Yo! I'm BrokenLife

Er... Depressing name aside...

Proverbs in writing:

Clarity is key: Readers do not know your story. Do not assume a reader can fill in the blanks. Reread and make sure they can understand who is doing what, what looks like what, and how things are done.

Biased inner voice: When reading your work, read it aloud. Your mental voice tends to feed to you what you intended to say when what you have written may not. It also helps to have a second set of eyes proofread to further reduce that self-bias.

Indent. Often: Part of our vision is based upon grouping. Write a long paragraph, we'd assume that the content within it is relevant to each other. Especially don't do this with dialogue because it'll confuse readers who said what.

Show, don't tell: Even in fanfiction, you want to be clear. You're painting a world using words. The less descriptive words used, the blurrier the image readers will imagine. Adjectives and strong nouns and verbs are like your paint. The better the words, the better your detail, the more vivid the picture it becomes.

You can see the difference between 'He ran to the store' vs 'The little boy dashed fervently to the old candy store around the corner.' Take a simple sentence, look at every component, and ask yourself this: Who? What? Why? When? Where? How?

Pet Peeves in writing:

Incorrect quotation marks. For whatever-thing-you-worship's sake, it's double-quotes for dialogue, not singles! You only use single quotes if it's a quote within a quote! We don't care how you write internal monologues, but keep the spoken ones right!

Ping Pong PoV. If there's a really good way to confuse readers, it's doing this. Make up your mind or use Third Person Omniscient. It's especially noticeable if you switch between different First Persons and infuriating when you switch between First and Third.

Deadword Pronouns. I appreciate your attempts to reduce repetitiveness through pronouns, but using pronouns all the time is just as repetitive as it is confusing. Tell me, if there is more than one man doing actions or talking, and you use 'he'; which one are you referring to? That's what you put readers through when you refuse to use names more than once every blue moon.

Long Paragraphs. Refer to Indent Often. No one likes a wall of text. Not even you, you just haven't realized it yet.

I currently Beta for CruxMDQ on Starwatch.