Warriors Fanfics: Specialized Writing Guide

BASE | Readability

June 19, 2019

This section pertains to readability. It is not on best editing practices or about specific languages. This ensures your stories are easy to read and digest for your readers. As a Base section, it has little to no examples drawn from canon Warriors.

You probably want to know why there is a section on readability. Everyone in the fandom can read and write. And almost every Warriors fanfiction is written in English, so no language barriers. But that is not readability. Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand written text. This pertains not only to the sentence structure and chosen words (syntax), but also to grammar and spelling (editing) and, most important, how easy it is to understand characters, plot, and setting. This is something often overlooked in the fanfic community as a whole. Some information from previous sections will spill over into this one, but it is all important. Here, I go over the common hallmarks of readability pertaining to Warriors.

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TECHNICAL READABILITY

You have all read fanfiction, or my previous sections. Simple errors are more common than you think. I will not sit here and tell you all grammar errors in your story will be fixed after reading this guide. We are all amateurs. We will make and fail to find some of our mistakes. But, specifically in this fandom, a startling number go unnoticed. As do a number of writing best practices. Sometimes these errors are so numerous it prevents people from reading a fanfic. This part is for those who honestly do not know best practices and some of the more obscure grammar rules. Obscure as they are, they are easy to spot by the reader when the writer makes a mistake on them. Even if the reader does not know the specific rule.

Here are some of those lesser known standards and practices:

- "This is what dialogue looks like," said Catstar.

"Yeah," Otherleaf said. "And we start a new line with a different speaker. If we have a lot to say and we want to break up a massive text block, we have a tool for that.

"We start a new line again! But this time, we leave off the quotation marks at the end of our last line. This shows the reader that the same speaker is talking, but breaks up what could otherwise be a hard-to-read text block of dialogue."

- Use some kind of noticeable symbol when skipping forward in time, like [~] or [--]. Do not forget to leave this symbol on a separate line without any other words.

- Too many exclamation marks can ruin our tone. This is a very common mistake! I see it often, and so do you if you read fanfics. It throws the mood off, even if it is supposed to be exciting! Use these sparingly; they are there to add a punch to a shouting character in most cases.

- Wattpad has a built-in word processor that many of its users choose to write with. It is the same as the processors on any other literature hosting site. They suck. All of them. Use Microsoft Word or Google Sheets instead (Word is better, but Sheets is free). They have spell checkers and better formatting tools.
* The word processor is the reason most of your errors go unaccounted for.

That brings us to terminology errors. Canon grammar does not exist, as the rules of grammar just make sure you are following the standards and practices established in English. Canon terminology, however, does. You all know this. Most fanfic help guides are just books that relist the terms from the Warriors wiki. I will not list those here, since there is the Warriors wiki. But there are some common errors that stands above the rest, and they are pretty obvious: