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Young Writers Society


Forum Tags - Feedback and Suggestions



How do we improve the tags?

Post an official list of the tags and uses.
10
53%
Add new tags!
6
32%
Combine more tags.
2
11%
Other.
1
5%
 
Total votes : 19


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Sat Dec 03, 2016 8:46 pm
Kale says...



If you choose Options 2-4, please leave a post in the thread!

Hello fellow inhabitants of the Writers Corner. A few months back, we of the Resources Crew sneakily snuck in some tags into the forum and let them loose in the wild to see how they would (or wouldn't) be used. Now that some time has passed and the tags have had a chance to get established in their new habitat, we're taking a closer look at the tags to see how well they match up in usage to our intentions so we can finally get around to writing an official list of the tags and their purposes.

What follows are the originally-intended uses of the tags:

Spoiler! :
Idea Pitch - Pitch your ideas for stories and get feedback on the concepts, characters, setting, etc.

Project Talk - Talk about everything and anything related to your ongoing writing projects. Answer fan questions, drop tidbits and teasers, make it a worldbuilding appendix, talk about your writers' block, note your writing goals, etc.

Publishing Adventures - Talk about everything and anything related to your adventures in getting published., such as the agents/publishers you're querying, their responses, the rejections, personal goals, etc.

Query Letters - Get feedback on one of the first things agents and publishers see: your query letter. We'll help you make your query letter the best it can be.

Synopsis - Get feedback on the other first thing agents and publishers see: your synopsis. Both more and less than a summary, this is where you make your story shine... or not. So let's help you polish it to a healthy gleam.

As you've probably noticed, there's be a lot of overlap in usage of some of the tags, namely Idea Pitch, Project Talk, and Synopsis.

Currently, the plan is to combine Query Letters and Synopsis together into Query Help. The tricky part the becomes: how can we better distinguish between Idea Pitch and Project Talk?

So, fellow inhabitants, how can we better distinguish between the two tags? Is some renaming in order? Would having a guide to the tags help nix all the issues?

Let us know! And while you're at it, feel free to suggest some new tags. And colors.*

*I'm the one who picked them, but I'm partially colorblind and apparently the colors I went with give some people headaches, so we should probably fix that too.
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Sat Dec 03, 2016 11:18 pm
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crossroads says...



Fair warning, my brain is a bit everywhere at once right now, so this will be way more rambly than necessary. But anyway, onwards we go!

My first thought upon reading the descriptions was that "Project Talk" is kind of an umbrella term that tends to include most of the others, and the reason it's difficult to distinguish from "Idea Pitch" is the fact that they're very much connected. "Project Talk" is just a very broad term that covers a lot of different stuff. "Idea Pitch", the way it's described in the spoiler, feels like a sub-category of it as well. Idea/premise is a part of any project, after all, and so is asking questions/getting feedback.

However, I get the idea that "Project Talk" is more for people to talk about their projects as they are, while "Idea Pitch" is to get help on stuff. It's just not clear enough without the description, and I don't think everyone would always make sure to read those before posting.
Perhaps we could consider renaming them to something like "Project Talk" ("Project Journal"?) and "Project Help"? So it's really as clear as it can be? It would mean two very broad terms again, but having a broad term that covers a lot of stuff is not bad! I love having it.
And on that note, since it's possible to add more than one tag to a topic, it might be useful to have some more specific tags to go with.

For example, we could add genre tags; the well-known ones, and then maybe a "cross-genre" one or some such for the ones that don't fit?

Having tags that specify what the talk is mostly about could also come in useful. "Project Help" tells you it's about a project and they need some advice/feedback/help -- if it's followed by "Characters", or "Plot" or "Descriptions", "Worldbuilding", "Dialogue" and so on, it'd give the people clearer picture of what the thread is about.

"Publishing Adventures" also sort of encompasses queries, pitches and synopses, IMO, along with all those things the description mentions. "Query Help" sounds like a good solution, although maybe I'd change it to "Submission Help" or some such? It might be just me, but "query help" sounds like it's specifically focused on query letters, and not so much the rest of the submission package.

I know most of these things can be mentioned in the title or the description of the topic, but they often aren't. Adding them to the list of tags could save people some trouble figuring out how to word their descriptions/titles, and instead just go with something like "[Title]: novella/short story help", and pinpoint the things they need help with, and/or what the genre is, by adding the relevant tags.


TL;DR, I want to add a bunch of specific tags that could be used to give a clearer picture of what the thread is about, and therefore hopefully attract the people who are able to help in more specific ways.

ETA: While I don't think everyone would always make sure to check it before posting, I still think a guide to tags would definitely be useful. I'm pretty sure there are people who don't even know tags are a thing, let alone what exactly they are or what they mean.
As for colours, honestly, I never even thought of them. I assume I could get used to telling what the tags are by colours alone, but right now I can't tell you which colour any of them is without looking them up. BUT if there's people bothered by the current colours, it's definitely something to look into!
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Sun Dec 04, 2016 4:22 am
Kale says...



Some possible new colors:

http://www.color-hex.com/color-palette/998
http://www.color-hex.com/color-palette/27009
Secretly a Kyllorac, sometimes a Murtle.
There are no chickens in Hyrule.
Princessence: A LMS Project
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Sat Dec 10, 2016 1:52 am
Lumi says...



Worldbuilding because dead brain right now. Brrrrrn.
I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.
-Shinji Moon


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