12-26-2004, 06:14 PM
(This post was last modified: 12-26-2004, 07:05 PM by MongoJerry.)
Minor nit: Druids can remove curses, too. As a priest player, I'd go into a rant about how mages never cast remove curse, but that's just my pet peeve.
More substantive nit: The biggest weakness of the guide is the one you told me before you posted it -- it's so long. Readers, especially those reading internet gaming sites, tend to have short attention spans, and it doesn't take much to lose their interests. I'm not asking you to remove any content. I am asking if perhaps you can say the same things more compactly.
I used to write a fantasy baseball column on the San Francisco Giants for ESPN.com. It wasn't a major thing, but I did have several thousand people reading what I wrote each time I posted something. The problem? ESPN.com had a restrictive formula for us Fantasy Baseball Correspondents as far as what column sections could appear and how long in characters each section could be. I used to hate how I'd have to reduce a 1500-2000 character section that I wrote down to 1000 characters. But you know what happened in the end? The writing got better as I removed phrases and replaced them with a simple word or I removed words like "very," "well," as well as unnecessary helping words. Sometimes I would realize that I didn't need to talk about a piece of information at all, since it was obvious, redundant, or just interfered with the flow of the narrative.
Reading through several sections of your guide, I see many places where sentences could be tightened and information could be conveyed more compactly. To give you full feedback on this would require a full editing job on the guide, and I don't want to do that here. But my advice is that you give yourself a project to shorten things down. I believe you mentioned that the guide was 57 pages in Word. If so, then I suggest that you make a goal for yourself to get it down to 50 pages. A good writer has to learn how to be a little cruel to one's work. It's all a process of seperating the wheat from the chaff or knocking away the quartz to get to the nugget of gold.
As I said before, the guide's great, and I hope you finish it off with late game information. It'll make a terrific addition to the Lurker Lounge. It just needs some polishing that I hope some of which you can do on your own. When you're at a point where you think you're "done," I think I'll have Occhi turn his editor's eye on the guide and see what he comes up with.
More substantive nit: The biggest weakness of the guide is the one you told me before you posted it -- it's so long. Readers, especially those reading internet gaming sites, tend to have short attention spans, and it doesn't take much to lose their interests. I'm not asking you to remove any content. I am asking if perhaps you can say the same things more compactly.
I used to write a fantasy baseball column on the San Francisco Giants for ESPN.com. It wasn't a major thing, but I did have several thousand people reading what I wrote each time I posted something. The problem? ESPN.com had a restrictive formula for us Fantasy Baseball Correspondents as far as what column sections could appear and how long in characters each section could be. I used to hate how I'd have to reduce a 1500-2000 character section that I wrote down to 1000 characters. But you know what happened in the end? The writing got better as I removed phrases and replaced them with a simple word or I removed words like "very," "well," as well as unnecessary helping words. Sometimes I would realize that I didn't need to talk about a piece of information at all, since it was obvious, redundant, or just interfered with the flow of the narrative.
Reading through several sections of your guide, I see many places where sentences could be tightened and information could be conveyed more compactly. To give you full feedback on this would require a full editing job on the guide, and I don't want to do that here. But my advice is that you give yourself a project to shorten things down. I believe you mentioned that the guide was 57 pages in Word. If so, then I suggest that you make a goal for yourself to get it down to 50 pages. A good writer has to learn how to be a little cruel to one's work. It's all a process of seperating the wheat from the chaff or knocking away the quartz to get to the nugget of gold.
As I said before, the guide's great, and I hope you finish it off with late game information. It'll make a terrific addition to the Lurker Lounge. It just needs some polishing that I hope some of which you can do on your own. When you're at a point where you think you're "done," I think I'll have Occhi turn his editor's eye on the guide and see what he comes up with.