[quote=@PerfectThought] I'm sorry. Could you possibly provide an example so I can sort the issue out? Rereading my text I'm not really sure what you're referring to, but that might just be because I understand what I'm on about haha. [/quote] I don't really police writing (god knows how much schlock I've sent erode over the years), but here's my honest thoughts. A lot of it is subjective and whatever since my personal take is readability first (I'm not going to submit collaborative writing to my spirit of James Joyce antics). RPG doesn't let me annotate things, so you'll have to deal with me speaking in generalities and highlighting specific things deep at 4AM. Paragraph length is pretty huge. One of the things to keep in mind is that line length is about 1.5x the length of a book. Because of the length, it's even easier to lose one's place in vertically dense paragraphs. I'm not really one for being a stickler for convention. I'm a firm believer of putting prescriptivists in their place. However, when they say that paragraphs should be ~150 words max, this is for readability reasons. For a quick primer, compare these two for their readability: [hider=Example 1]Identity: Tomtabeg is one of the many children of a fairly wealthy merchant and trader. And as the 6th in line to inherit the family business he was always put on the back burner. He began life being trained into the role of a doctor-surgeon, a profession of enough class to suit his family's status but nothing that might threaten his sibling's firm positions as business mogul heirs and heiresses. However, he paid no mind to this, as he was perfectly happy flying under the family radar and spending his time getting into minor trouble and being an overall daredevil and speed freak. He found himself in the business of Cleaning more as a hobby than as a means to sustain his life. Given he has access to pretty major funds anyway. However, apart from an extensive suite of cybernetics and enhancements, he lives a seedy life. Preferring instead to live the life of a minor criminal than the boring luxury of a merchant's son. By his teen years, he was already extensively modified, both cosmetically and functionally. He naturally picked up the habit of the usage of many different 'mind-altering substances' and a fair few body-altering substances as well. He lives a hedonistic life of savage violence, white-knuckle action, and drug-fueled partying. One might find him somewhat entitled, given he was gifted with so many advantages in life and chose to blow them all on drugs, crime, and action; but he considers it to be a simple matter of rebellion and rejection from the lifestyle the was pre-determined he was meant to live.[/hider] [hider=Example 2][b]Identity:[/b] Tomtabeg is one of the many children of a fairly wealthy merchant and trader. And as the 6th in line to inherit the family business he was always put on the back burner. He began life being trained into the role of a doctor-surgeon, a profession of enough class to suit his family's status but nothing that might threaten his sibling's firm positions as business mogul heirs and heiresses. However, he paid no mind to this, as he was perfectly happy flying under the family radar and spending his time getting into minor trouble and being an overall daredevil and speed freak. He found himself in the business of Cleaning more as a hobby than as a means to sustain his life. Given he has access to pretty major funds anyway. However, apart from an extensive suite of cybernetics and enhancements, he lives a seedy life. Preferring instead to live the life of a minor criminal than the boring luxury of a merchant's son. By his teen years, he was already extensively modified, both cosmetically and functionally. He naturally picked up the habit of the usage of many different 'mind-altering substances' and a fair few body-altering substances as well. He lives a hedonistic life of savage violence, white-knuckle action, and drug-fueled partying. One might find him somewhat entitled, given he was gifted with so many advantages in life and chose to blow them all on drugs, crime, and action; but he considers it to be a simple matter of rebellion and rejection from the lifestyle the was pre-determined he was meant to live.[/hider] It's not perfect since I'm pretty much just adding in line breaks to something I didn't write, but using bold and adding linebreaks makes things much easier to read. I didn't really bring this up initially because it comes up less often in posts. When I say fragments and the like, I mean in a way that the sentence construction makes things difficult to read. Some sentences feel like incomplete thoughts, some are written in a way that make them feel bloated. I'm just going to go down sentences line by line. [hider=Example 3]Tomtabeg is one of the many children of a fairly wealthy merchant and trader. [i]This is fine; calling him a merchant and trader is a bit strange. Generally, if there's something to inherit, you'd phrase it in a way to denote it. Something like head of a company/corporation/conglomerate/chaebol. But it is also a weird anachronistic world where crown-magistrate is a position.[/i] And as the 6th in line to inherit the family business he was always put on the back burner. [i]A weird way to phrase it. Probably remove the preposition (And) and add a comma to denote the dependent clause.[/i] He began life being trained into the role of a doctor-surgeon, a profession of enough class to suit his family's status but nothing that might threaten his sibling's firm positions as business mogul heirs and heiresses. [i]This is an pretty long sentence that is meant to convey information, but gets pretty lost.[/i] However, he paid no mind to this, as he was perfectly happy flying under the family radar and spending his time getting into minor trouble and being an overall daredevil and speed freak. [i]Another long sentence. When you compound long sentences after each other, they kind of get difficult to track as there's so much going on. Splitting it into two would make it a bit more readable.[/i] He found himself in the business of Cleaning more as a hobby than as a means to sustain his life. [i]This one's fine. I don't like capitalizing cleaning because it just looks wrong to me, but it's whatever in the scheme of things.[/i] Given he has access to pretty major funds anyway. [i]I'm pretty sure this is a fragment (I think it's a dependent clause; I'm not the most accurate at identifying them)[/i] However, apart from an extensive suite of cybernetics and enhancements, he lives a seedy life. [i]This is probably fine. I preposition > dependent clause > independent clause sometimes and I've never actually checked if it's correct to do that.[/i] Preferring instead to live the life of a minor criminal than the boring luxury of a merchant's son. [i]I think this is pretty weird construction. I think it's a dependent clause.[/i] By his teen years, he was already extensively modified, both cosmetically and functionally. [i]This one's a comma splice, pretty sure.[/i] He naturally picked up the habit of the usage of many different 'mind-altering substances' and a fair few body-altering substances as well. [i]You can shorten this a lot (see below). Also, it's pretty weird to scare quote mind-altering substances. It signifies that they weren't actually mind-altering substances. He naturally picked up the habit of taking as many different mind-altering and body-altering substances as he could stomach.[/i] He lives a hedonistic life of savage violence, white-knuckle action, and drug-fueled partying. [i]This one's really good. I like this line. It's like it punches me in the face with exactly what he is as a man (which is a very good thing).[/i] One might find him somewhat entitled, given he was gifted with so many advantages in life and chose to blow them all on drugs, crime, and action; but he considers it to be a simple matter of rebellion and rejection from the lifestyle the was pre-determined he was meant to live. [i]This one is also kind of weird. It has a comma splice and restates some stuff. Making some changes smooths it out. Compare it to: One might find him entitled given that he was gifted with so many advantages and still blew it all on drugs, crime, and action. Nid, however, considers his lifestyle to be a simple matter of rebellion from his predetermined upbringing.[/i][/hider] Also this came up when I was doing a post audit: "its" is the possessive, "it's" is a contraction for it is. It's a curse when you learn this because you start reading stuff as "the earth and it is people" and the like. [hr] This post got out of hand pretty quick. I'm not the best at identifying and rationalizing things beyond "it looks strange to me" so it probably has a few mistakes in my critique (plus I wrote it deep in the AM while watching my friends play Dork and Dorker).