by Caelani Bittel Fri Mar 18, 2011 10:45 pm
All suggestions contained within are the opinion and preference of the person who plays Angelique Pyrites, Lucy Weasley, Damon Ambrojze and Caelani Bittel.
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Move the story forward
My number one rule for replying to a thread is to make sure the person I'm RPing with has something to reply to, but I don't like doing all the work.
If you constantly give me replies where your character's posts don't move the thread forward in any significant way, the thread will end very quickly when my character leaves. It's just selfish to expect someone else to put in all the effort.
Give my character something to care about
You can say your character was having breakfast in the Great Hall or reading in the library, but people do that all the time. Why would my character care enough to bother with yours?
I find it really difficult to reply to threads with generic beginnings. If you give my character something they can care about from the outset, you're more likely to get a decent reply.
Write in paragraphs
If your writing isn't paragraphed properly, I can't read it and I'll probably miss something.
FYI: Break your paragraph when you start writing about a new idea or topic. There is no minimum sentence requirement for a paragraph unless you're writing an essay.
Break your paragraph whenever a character speaks, or whenever they stop speaking and you go back to writing description. None of this "talking in the middle" of a block of text stuff. Picking dialogue out from the middle of a paragraph of description is the main cause of my distress.
Don't write too much
Writing more doesn't make your post better. In fact, it increases the chances of redundancy and I'll probably skim half of it.
I don't need to know what your character is wearing or what they ate for breakfast or what their surroundings look like. I want to know what they're doing. You don't need 1000 words for that.
