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Animal sounds "misspelled"

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MrKittyLuver

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Apr 8, 2017
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I recently submitted a story which was returned for "misspelled words". Checking through the draft again shows that the "misspelled word" is "Awk", which I'm using to represent the vocalization of a parrot, much like one might use "woof" or "meow" for a dog or cat. I'd rather not do a rewrite if I can avoid it, naturally. Any suggestions for how I might contact the moderator who approves stories to get this story passed or should I just bite the bullet and do the rewrite?
 
MrKittyLuver said:
Any suggestions for how I might contact the moderator who approves stories to get this story passed or should I just bite the bullet and do the rewrite?
Click to expand...

I'm still pretty new here myself, but as far as I have seen, the answer to this sort of question is usually "Send a private message to Laurel".

I had a vaguely similar issue, and it took a few days, but Laurel did eventually respond to my concern and provided me with a solution. Best of luck.
 
I suggest you repost it and in the notes there say "'awk' is the animal sound of a parrot, not a word"

But i doubt you actually got dinged for that. Did you hit it with a spell checker?

I personally recommend you avoid writing phonetic sounds, and just use description instead. A quacking duck says corner in French.
 
Well, there was also spelling blow-job as one word without the hyphen and spelling Plexiglas not as the brand name (lower case with two "s"'s), but mainly it was the animal sound going by sheer numbers.

I like the way it reads, but if I have to leave out the "awk" and just replace it with "it squawked", I guess that's what I'll do.
 
I make a list at the top of my submission detailing those words that will trigger spell check, and identifying them as: sound effect, interjection, slang, common usage and such.

One would hope that words like 'cocksucker' would get through, (and I prefer 'buttfuck' to be one word), but I take no chances.
 
latecomer91364 said:
I make a list at the top of my submission detailing those words that will trigger spell check, and identifying them as: sound effect, interjection, slang, common usage and such.
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At the top of your story? And the mod removes that before publishing or do your stories just have this list sitting there for all time? This story is also going to become more problematic with additional chapters due to the occasional use of "text speak", like "ur" for "you're"...makes me wonder if I should bother continuing with it.
 
MrKittyLuver said:
At the top of your story? And the mod removes that before publishing or do your stories just have this list sitting there for all time? This story is also going to become more problematic with additional chapters due to the occasional use of "text speak", like "ur" for "you're"...makes me wonder if I should bother continuing with it.
Click to expand...

Put your points in the Notes when you re-submit.
State what you are trying to achieve
Machines do not like to check their own words!
 
Are you sure that's the misspelled word? It would be annoying if lit's spellcheck was complaining about something else.

@Laurel @manu - would be good if authors could perform LIT's spellcheck before submitting
 
NoJo said:
Are you sure that's the misspelled word? It would be annoying if lit's spellcheck was complaining about something else.

@Laurel @manu - would be good if authors could perform LIT's spellcheck before submitting
Click to expand...

I use the Grammarly extension in Chrome, personally, and other than one instance of the word "jizz" which it claims is misspelled and one instance of text speak triggering it which I totally understand, it's the phonetic spellings that are making all the red underlines for me after fixing the hyphens and brand names. Too bad, really, because I quite like onomatopoeia...they read as more active than your usual descriptive text to my eyes. That may just be my love of comic books showing through, though.
 
MrKittyLuver said:
I use the Grammarly extension in Chrome, personally, and other than one instance of the word "jizz" which it claims is misspelled and one instance of text speak triggering it which I totally understand, it's the phonetic spellings that are making all the red underlines for me after fixing the hyphens and brand names. Too bad, really, because I quite like onomatopoeia...they read as more active than your usual descriptive text to my eyes. That may just be my love of comic books showing through, though.
Click to expand...

I love comic books - They make me go GABLOOONG!!
 
MrKittyLuver said:
Too bad, really, because I quite like onomatopoeia...
Click to expand...

That is too bad. I'm a big fan of onomatopoeia myself and I use a lot of it in my stories. I've never been dinged for misspellings, and I use words like "Ooohhh", "Unf!", "Nngh!"and "Sooo gooood..." all the time. It is very surprising to me that "Awk" would not make it through, but those would.

How are you submitting your stories? Copy/paste or as a file?

I copy/paste mine with my own HTML tags for italics and bold text, and I always include a note telling the moderator that the text has HTML tags in it. I wonder if they skip the spell check to avoid hitting on the tags.
 
I write it up in Wordpad and copy/paste, then start the red line hunt. I only submitted it once, and as I've noted, there were some other errors besides the animal noises. I suppose it's possible I'm overstating the issue.

I've fixed everything but the text speak and word sounds and I'm going to resubmit it with a note to the moderators. Thanks so much to everyone for their help!
 
Spell checkers will not catch all of your spelling mistakes. E.g. there/their/they're, were/we're and so on.
 
90% of the time, the "Grammar and spelling" rejection is due to punctuation in dialogue. Check where your punctuation marks are in relation to the quote marks. For whatever reason, Laurel catches those mistakes with eagle-eye precision.

I seriously doubt that animal sounds have anything to do with it. I've submitted all sorts of jargon, nonsense vocalizations, dialect, magic words, made up languages, etc. that a spell-checker chokes on, and they've sailed through without a hitch.

Double-check all your dialogue. Make sure the punctuation is inside the quote marks, and that you're terminating the quote with a comma instead of a period when there's a tag afterward ( he said, she said, etc. )
 
A single "misspelled" sound (there aren't many "legal" spellings of sounds) setting off a rejection is unlikely. I'd look elsewhere, but, yes, if you can't find anything PM the editor, Laurel, on specifically what she thinks has been misspelled. If you want someone to give it an independent look for the problem, feel free to PM me and I'll give you an address where you can send a Word attachment for scanning.
 
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