Subject: From Personal Experience
Author:
Posted on: 2015-02-24 10:19:00 UTC

Seeing as I am one of those people who wrote a badfic and was over the age of 16. From my personal experience English teachers aren't teaching enough SPaG stuff, sure they cover the basics but then they move on to studying Shakespeare or Lord of the Flies and expect essays on that instead, there's very little creative writing done in schools, at least that I'm aware of, only one piece of coursework out of the ten or so I did during GCSE English was creative writing (it's also the one of the two things I got an A* in in GCSE), and even before GCSE there seemed to be very little stuff done on creative writing at all. The other problem I had was my handwriting, it was and still is horrible and the English department at my school were SO focused on getting it legible that I missed a huge amount of lesson time in favour of trying to get my fingers into a position they couldn't physically bend themselves into, thus I still don't know how to use things like semi colons correctly.

I guess what I'm theorizing is that English teachers aren't necessarily teaching us enough about creative writing for people to write things like fan and original fiction, well with decent SPaG and good grasps of plot, character development etc. And without studying further, or with friends more well versed in using the English language to help, Suethors could just not be aware that what they're doing is wrong, especially seeing as most reviews on fanfiction go along the lines of "Great work, please keep it up" and only a very few people actually take their time to stop and point out what is going wrong, and even then it may not necessarily be done in the most friendly fashion.

Storme Hawk

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