Please stop doing this one weird trick!

[conuly]

Yes, it's true that each time you switch speakers you start a new paragraph, but that does not mean that you stay in the old paragraph right up until the moment somebody else speaks.

As soon as the action switches from Alice to Bob, that's when you start the paragraph.



1. Alice shook her head. "I don't think that works, Bob." Bob turned around in confusion.

"Why not? It makes perfect sense to me!" Alice sighed as she struggled to explain.

"It just... doesn't!"

2. Alice shook her head. "I don't think that works, Bob."

Bob turned around in confusion. "Why not? It makes perfect sense to me!"

Alice sighed as she struggled to explain. "It just... doesn't!"

You see? One of these definitely flows better.

On an unrelated note, if somebody says they welcome otherwise unsolicited editorial corrections of spelling, grammar, general word choice, exactly how much should one take them at their word, and how many suggestions are too many?

Comments

[redbird]

I would probably start by offering a couple of corrections like "there's a word missing here, I think it might be Alice" or "'sook' here should be 'shook'? and see what sort of response I got. If they seemed to actually appreciate those, I might give them some grammar corrections or the sort of copy editing that's partly a matter of opinion. I wouldn't start with saying an adverb would work better at a different place in the sentence, or that "so" would work better than "consequently." At one point, a lot of reviews and discussion about the Thomas Covenant books said some version of "take away the writer's thesaurus"

I occasionally leave comments on AO3 that, after saying I liked the work, have "unsolicited spelling/grammar correction." Those are for either very obvious things, or ones that made me stop reading to try ti figure them out, as in the "there's a word missing here, I think it might be Alice" where it matters where the missing word is Alice, Toto, or tea.