Five Reading Turnoffs As A Reader And Writer

1. Lack of paragraph breaks

Nothing turns me off from reading more than opening a piece of work and seeing a glob of text with no breaks in the text. 

How am I supposed to focus on reading when there are no spaces? Paragraph breaks help pace your work in a stylistic manner but also in a manner that is accessible to your readers. 

A good way to remember this is TiPToP: Time Place Topic Person. 

This is all basic stuff. It's always good to refresh and go over the basics. 

1. Overuse Of Epithets 

Just like said epithets are quite overused in fiction, especially fanfiction. Now there's nothing wrong with the occasional epithet. Perhaps you're introducing a character the reader doesn't know yet.

Maybe stick to using pronouns for a few paragraphs or have an alias for them on stand by so you can avoid this conundrum. 

A good use of epithets that I myself can think of is  Welcome To Nightvale’s episode A Story About Them and A Story About You (episodes 45 and 13 respectively) 

Although this is an audio medium, Joseph Fink and Jeffery Cranor do an excellent job of balancing the use of pronoun usage and epithets while also having the story be in third person most of the time. If you have the time I recommend you check the transcripts for the episodes. 

1. Story Pacing / Investment 

This is more of a nitpick than a turn off but man, don't you hate it when a character sets off on an adventure in chapter 4 and the climax and resolution happens in chapter 15? 

I'm not here to tell you how to tell your story if you want to write a no stakes story for fun that's cool!

If you want readers to get invested try not to have your characters get stabbed in the climax only for it to be resolved a chapter later by them being healed by “The Princess Of The Healing Touch”

 let your characters get hurt and sacrifice parts of themselves this pans out the suspense, it also makes the resolution much more fulfilling. 

1. Avoiding Said But Overusing Other Verbs

Let it be… said I have nothing against the word. I would avoid using it once every other sentence, however neglecting it altogether and using verbs that do not match the tone of the dialogue can kill your dialogue. This sounds good: 

“I agree,” said Judy. Her voice was firm yet quiet. She had made up her mind. 

This sounds terrible: 

“I agree!” Howled Judy. Her voice was firm yet quiet. She had made up her mind. 

The tone and voice of your dialogue and story depends on the verbs you use. Said isn't dead but use verbs carefully it can be a major turnoff if you're using miscellaneous verbs every other sentence

1. Incorrect Usage Of Apostrophe 

I see this way more than I should. I understand using an apostrophe in contracted words (because that's where they go) unless you're writing in Shakespearean English you should use an apostrophe for contracted words such as; it's, you're, who’s, they’re etc.

A common mistake is mixing up possessives and contractions because they're homophones. I'm no English teacher and even mess these up sometimes because English is not my first language. Perhaps you're writing a character that doesn't use contractions in their dialogue. 

That's all from me, this was written as a morning warm up! Let me know if this helps or if you have some reading peeves yourself maybe I'll write about them. - Zonye☆