On Wed, 04 Nov 1998 00:27:04   David Johnston wrote:

Toran Robinson wrote:

In short, I am once again griping about fics being submitted as
attachments.  Or with oddball formats.  Is Cut & Paste really that

hard?

Three fics so far today which could not be opened, read, enjoyed _or_
given feedback on, because the authors couldn't be bothered to use a
mouse.

Total agreement...there's absolutely no excuse for posting fics as
attachments just because you're too lazy to do a quick cut and paste
operation which takes all of about fifteen seconds, if that.

For the record, the most common reason for attachments is that the 
chapter or fic is too long to fit into the 30kb limitation.  Laziness 
has nothing to do with it, just the desire not to break up the story 
into seperate posts.  

But discourtesy has everything to do with it.  
 

Of course, if you happen to not want your fic read, then go ahead and
post attachments. Everyone will probably be just as happy to delete it
as they would to read it.

Exactly.  If the writer is not thinking of the readers, the readers
won't think of the writer; if it's not readable, it won't be read.
Unless the writer is willing to put in the time to make it readable
and easy to download the general readership won't take the time to
read it, pure and simple. 

I've said that and this before, but they're worth repeating:

1) Use only the standard ASCII characters 32-126: A-Z, a-z, 0-9, 
   '"!@#$%^&*()`~[]\{}|;:<>?,./ and the space and carriage return.
   Don't use tabs, extended characters, or anything that won't
   show up on *every* computer or might be converted in the
   transfer.  Not everyone uses the same configuration as you do;
   it's arrogant to assume they do or should.

2) Split your parts into 32K chunks.  If it's one complete story, 
   tell everyone at the start of the first part to combine them
   into one story.  Look at Alan Harnum's series "Waters Under
   Earth", he has no problem splitting up his stories.

3) Spell and grammar check.  <*sigh*>  It's old news and a dead 
   horse that I flog too often, but some people still don't get
   it.

4) Use a blank line with carriage return between paragraphs; 
   indents *don't* work, especially if you used a tab.  If a 
   person has to reformat the story, paragraphs without spacing 
   may cause the whole thing to be treated as one paragraph.

These aren't that hard to do and make a story so much more 
readable.  

If you were writing a computer game, you wouldn't half-finish 
it and distribute it with the specs and tell the buyers to
finish it themselves, would you?  The buyers and readers want 
a complete, finished and polished work.  It's not that much 
to ask for.

Shunsuke



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