Or when people use "umm" and "er" when they have a character write a letter. How freaking stupid can people be?

 

The use of ellipsis "..." for dramatic effect in a letter.:facepalm

 

To be fair, that fic was a throw back to an earlier era when it was published, it would have fitted in better circa '04...maybe even '03.

EDIT: knight504, an ellipsis is used to indicate a hesitation or pause, its how you can indicate a pause for thought for example. Its why I use it in my posts, cause I post like I speak. Use in a letter would be weird but is not necessarily incorrect.

 

I use "Er" from time to time when I'm e-mailing people. I'm sure I can't be the only one that does it.

 

It comes from typing like you speak. When writing a letter, in a society where it is still the formal means of communication, you don't write like you speak, you write formally.

I bet you don't use 'er' in emails to your boss, or if you're applying for a job? Or if you're emailing your teacher? You write like its a proper letter. Thats how letters in HP should be written, because they are a formal, non-instantaneous form of communication.

 

I'd expect it from Ron, to be honest; others, especially Hermione? Not so much.

 

I understand what you mean, but if you're just writing a letter to a friend, I don't see why it would be an issue, provided it wasn't used very often.

Of course, the last time I wrote a formal letter was a few months ago, and I doubt it was a shining example. While we were taught how to write a letter in school, that was back in lower Elementary school.

I suppose I just spend too much time IM'ing people and chatting on boards/threads, since in those situations you pretty much do write like you speak.

 

Thats exactly it, in the wizarding world letter writing is still the common thing, and it won't devolve into 'conversational text' because thats just not how you write a letter. It won't necessarily be a problem if you write something like 'er' when writing to a friend, but its not how you write a letter, especially if you write a lot of letters.

I'm not saying that every letter written by your fics characters has to be perfectly grammatically correct, and subscribe to every single letter writing convention. But...they would show some effort to obey the more common ones.

What really gets to me, and I've only really seen it in a couple of recently started fics in recent weeks, is authors including text speak in letters being written by characters. It doesn't even make any sense...its just obviously that the author writes like that when communicating with friends, and is probably too young to have really been used to using properly spelled words in such communications before text speak became the common thing. So they simply believe that that is how you correspond with friends, that there could not possibly be any other option. Which of course shows they are retards...but oh well...

 

Again, Author's Notes in text. God, that pisses me off.

Eg, Harry sighed, shaking his head at Ginny's untamed bush. (A.N: think of the Amazon, but red).

"No fucking way am I going to try and hack through that."

 

What's worse is where they insert authors notes including URLs into the text. I mean, are they really expecting me to stop reading the fic, open a new window, paste in the URL and wait for an image to load up to see what some random piece of clothing/jewellery/book/bed/trunk/wand/staff/house/castle/person looks like (that is an accurate representation of all the things I have seen this done for, and I've probably missed a few).

 

Pet peeve: The head of a household having absolute power over his family members, especially the women to the point it's basically an imperius. Usually used to get Tonks, Narcissa and Bellatrix.

 

Similarly, Head of House being able to dissolve marriages. Wouldn't the Black Matriarch (assuming Orion and Cygnus were dead) have done so for Andromeda's marriage?

 

Andromeda didn't marry by the contract, so they don't have power to dissolve the marriage. Where as it's different for Narcissa and Bellatrix.

Regarding the imperius like power, I agree that it's ridiculous. It is written by many authors who don't have the guts to write a full evil rapist Harry and satisfying their fantasies by making Harry head of the black and having imperius type power over those three.

 

Where is it ever said that Narcissa and Bellatrix married by contract?

The entire idea of marriage contracts, family Heads and family bonds are complete fanon.

Really, canon doesn't give us much more than an eleven year old boy claiming some families are better than others and a crazy old woman burning off the faces of people she thinks don't deserve to be on her family tree wallpaper.

 

Its never stated in canon that they married by contract, you are right. However in fics where a head of house can dissolve marriages it is often also the case that marriage contracts are common. Finding the former without the latter is very rare.

 

I was going to say 11-year-olds acting their age instead of much older, but then I realized that in the only fic that had them acting like normal 11-year-olds (The Best Revenge and its sequel), it bugged the shit out of me. So now I get annoyed whenever I read complaints on DLP (and other places) that characters are acting far too mature for their ages... because, really, I don't want to read about little kids. And nobody's complaining about VINCET's Harry, now are they?

 

There are degree's of acting too mature or not. I'm quite happy to read about a Harry who is intelligent and reasoning when he goes to Hogwarts, who has reasonable levels of general knowledge and moderately good social skills.

However, there are two things that authors really should try to avoid when writing 11 year olds. First is sexual commentary. I'm not trying to say 11 year olds don't have sexualised thoughts, but they are the thing that really jars me when reading about an 11 year old, when they're having mature sexual thoughts. Second is extreme levels of sarcasm. Now, I'm one of the more sarcastic folk I've ever met, but at the age of 11 I was only mildly sarcastic. 11 year olds simply don't have the ability to be properly sarcastic. A small amount of sarcasm is fine, it can be quite good and amusing, but more than that and it becomes obvious that the characters aren't actually children, they are adults in children's bodies.

 

Yeah, I don't want to read about 11-year-olds in the context of sex either.

 

Tell that to Ruskbyte and his 'prepubescent breasts'. A bit too descriptive there.

 

Err, what? I've only read Something Grim.. and Backwards Compatible by him. Egad.