I didn’t spend a lot of time writing today. In fact, I didn’t do much writing. What I did end up doing was beta reading through serveral pages of acquaintances’ stories. This was mostly due to the fact that I was avoiding my computer because I used it a lot during November and I, sort of, neglected my reading responsibilities. Either way, I got through a lot of pages today.
I could have read through more but these certain pages needed many comments and suggestions on setting, sentence structure, and missing words. It’s not like I mind the extra work. I’ve told them to let me know if they don’t want me to stop picking out bad grammar. So far, they haven’t said to stop. This also helps me in a way because reading other people’s work not only gives you an opportunity to come in contact with a different writing style, you can avoid some mistakes that you may see in someone’s work and vice versa. I believe that one can always learn something from reading other’s works.
There was one story that I read today that appeared to be vomitted on by a thesaurus. This is possibly the harshest thing that I have said. I mean it in the nicestest of ways too. It wasn’t as bad as I make it sound but there were a few words that didn’t belong there. I couldn’t even figure out what the original word was meant to be. This isn’t a warning about uaing a thesaurus but more like something to keep mind.
Usually, I used a thesaurus so that my writing and certain words become repetitive. For example:
It’s not like this person had every word changed. It just so happened to be in one paragraphed and I had trouble figuring out what they were to describe. You can say that this was my lesson for today.
Dabbling in the Art of Writing 