June 19, 2019
[This guide was copied, as is, from Wattpad. At the time, I had no intention of posting it here. Please excuse any discrepancies.]

This section pertains to readability. It is not on best editing practices or about specific languages. This ensures your stories are easy to read and digest for your readers. As a Base section, it has little to no examples drawn from canon Warriors.

You probably want to know why there is a section on readability. Everyone in the fandom can read and write. And almost every Warriors fanfiction is written in English, so no language barriers. But that is not readability. Readability is the ease with which a reader can understand written text. This pertains not only to the sentence structure and chosen words (syntax), but also to grammar and spelling (editing) and, most important, how easy it is to understand characters, plot, and setting. This is something often overlooked in the fanfic community as a whole. Some information from previous sections will spill over into this one, but it is all important. Here, I go over the common hallmarks of readability pertaining to Warriors.

TECHNICAL READABILITY

You have all read fanfiction, or my previous sections. Simple errors are more common than you think. I will not sit here and tell you all grammar errors in your story will be fixed after reading this guide. We are all amateurs. We will make and fail to find some of our mistakes. But, specifically in this fandom, a startling number go unnoticed. As do a number of writing best practices. Sometimes these errors are so numerous it prevents people from reading a fanfic. This part is for those who honestly do not know best practices and some of the more obscure grammar rules. Obscure as they are, they are easy to spot by the reader when the writer makes a mistake on them. Even if the reader does not know the specific rule.

Here are some of those lesser known standards and practices:

- "This is what dialogue looks like," said Catstar.

"Yeah," Otherleaf said. "And we start a new line with a different speaker. If we have a lot to say and we want to break up a massive text block, we have a tool for that.

"We start a new line again! But this time, we leave off the quotation marks at the end of our last line. This shows the reader that the same speaker is talking, but breaks up what could otherwise be a hard-to-read text block of dialogue."

- Use some kind of noticeable symbol when skipping forward in time, like [~] or [-]. Do not forget to leave this symbol on a separate line without any other words.

- Too many exclamation marks can ruin our tone. This is a very common mistake! I see it often, and so do you if you read fanfics. It throws the mood off, even if it is supposed to be exciting! Use these sparingly; they are there to add a punch to a shouting character in most cases.

- Wattpad has a built-in word processor that many of its users choose to write with. It is the same as the processors on any other literature hosting site. They suck. All of them. Use Microsoft Word or Google Sheets instead (Word is better, but Sheets is free [2021 update - MS Word has a free browser-only version, too]). They have spell checkers and better formatting tools.
* The word processor is the reason most of your errors go unaccounted for.

That brings us to terminology errors. Canon grammar does not exist, as the rules of grammar just make sure you are following the standards and practices established in English. Canon terminology, however, does. You all know this. Most fanfic help guides are just books that relist the terms from the Warriors wiki. I will not list those here, since there is the Warriors wiki. But there are some common errors that stands above the rest, and they are pretty obvious:

- CatStar and OtherLeaf belong to Shadowclan.

- Clans should have deputies, unless specifically stated that they do not.

- "Cats don't meow everything they say," meowed Catstar.

- Clans do not keep precise date (you better explain if they can). They know time of year by season, which is not spring, summer, fall, and winter.

I am surprised how many of these errors get past us. Especially that capitalization one. We all read the books and/or wiki. We know how ShadowClan is supposed to be spelled, or that winter is called 'leafbare'. In other fandoms, getting simple canon terminology wrong is enough to get our fanfic crucified in the comments section. But not in this fandom.

As I stated in previous sections, the Warriors fandom has younger members than most, and the users of Wattpad tend to be high school or younger. We also prefer to update our stories as they are written, like social media posts, rather than as whole works. Again, these are not bad things. It just makes us more prone to mistakes like this, whether they be from haste, sloth, or mood. And if the readers do not notice, what does it matter, right… is an argument I do not support. But enough on technical readability. There are plenty of other guides and websites that exclusively go over grammar and terminology, and this is not one of them. Let us go over the readability I am really talking about.

READABILITY OF YOUR STORY

What I consider real readability is what the reader knows in your story. Of course, you know your ThunderClan will declare war on ShadowClan. It is in your outline and you have written it down… but what about your reader. Has your reader been given any foreshadowing that this would happen? Have any of the character's actions led to such a thing? What about the plot; what has happened that has led up to an event like this? That is readability. Essentially, it is just communicating what you want to say better, but for writing.

Getting straight to it, an example plot summary from our nonexistent fanfiction:

- Catclaw of ShadowClan was off on patrol when she came across a cavern. She walked inside, but shortly in she found there was a lone badger resting. The inexperienced warrior ran off when it stirred and straight across ThunderClan's border and into one of their patrols. She argues with them about being scared by a badger, but they do not believe her and she has to fight. She sends all three ThunderClan warriors running and heads back to camp to brag about it. Her clanmates then discuss a possible war with ThunderClan and what will happen at the next gathering. But, before any of that can happen, Otherpaw, the medicine cat apprentice, wants to see Catclaw in private. She has just deciphered the prophecy Catclaw had as an apprentice and cannot wait until the gathering to discuss it...

Did you notice anything wrong with that chapter summary? No? Neither do most readers and writers in this fandom. By the way, that summary was of a chapter from a fanfic on this very website (with names changed). That is why this section is here. This summary is not very readable for our audience. Yes they can process every event, but what about recalling them days or even hours later?

One chapter, one event. That is a rule-of-thumb professional writers stick to for the sake of readability. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but it holds up in all other situations. Our nonexistent example was all over the place. First she finds a badger, then she fights off some hostile cats, then she discusses a war and talks about a prophecy. That is a lot of unrelated events for one chapter. And why is that? Maybe we could not write enough about one thing to fill a chapter, so we fill it with other events. These events can vary in importance, but the point is they are interfering with the main focus of the chapter. If our focus was on finding and foreshadowing the presence of a badger in the setting, then make the chapter about that. If discussing the possibility of war is that important, save it for another chapter. Maybe our fight with ThunderClan is relevant enough to stay, but just end the chapter with the fight.

This dividing of events into chapters would solve many problems in regards to readability across the fandom. Some authors just want to add too many things to their story. Too many subplots, too many love triangles. My other sections have discussed keeping our plot and grammar clean and consistent. To learn what kind of story we want to write and how we want to do it. And if there is no room in your story for an arc-spanning prophecy or a betrayal subplot, then shrink it or take it out. Stories that try to add too many details are quickly forgotten. It is one reason why so few events can be recalled from the canon Warriors books.

That takes us to the why; why is this problem never caught? It is because our readers are used to average readability. Like any fanfic writer, we follow the example of the canon laid out before us. Warriors has an extremely large cast of named characters, probably one of the largest out there. And all of them are visible with details and personalities described at some point. That is ridiculous for a book! So much so, that the Erins have to jump back and forth between characters in the middle of books to make sure each of them gets at least some time in the reader's mind. Most of these characters exist to die or as plot devices; that is just how large casts of characters work in fiction, and there is nothing wrong with that, at least.

The problem comes in that it is done to the point of normality. It is normal to see a cat mentioned, have their physical and mental attributes described, have them do something, and then never see them again (the famous or infamous pre-prologue character lists). Warriors tells a very plot-driven story. So do fictional works like The Hunger Games, Divergent, Assassin's Creed, and Family Guy. The characters are not always the ones driving things forward here. Sometimes this has to do with how the fiction was originally presented (especially in the case of episodic TV shows or games). Opposite of that, character-driven stories, are Game of Thrones, Bojack Horseman, and Steven Universe. These works' plots are driven almost entirely by their cast's actions rather than events laid out in prior. If you have seen or played any of these works, then you may have not realized how much a role the medium and target audience plays on the storytelling and readability.

Warriors is no exception; an extreme example, in fact. In our fandom, we love character death, bastard kits, prophecies, and drama. We have been given an excess of it. Therefore, our fanfics commonly have excess of these things, too. Perhaps to a lesser extent than canon, but still an excess. Again, this is not necessarily a wrong way to present fiction. But it is something we should watch out for if we want our fiction to be memorable. Some fictional works that get it somewhere in between are The Simpsons, Star Trek, My Little Pony: FiM, and Harry Potter. They are no better or worse than the other works mentioned, seeing as entertainment is a matter of opinion. But we tend to remember the final list of fictional works better. Just something to think about. Try not to bury our plot in a list of events or character moments.

IN CONCLUSION…

So there you have it on readability. That last section was a mouthful, but an important distinction to make (more on plot versus character-driven stories is found in another section). Not only is it important to fix grammar errors and formatting issues, but useful for finding runaway subplots and useless characters. If we want our readers to hold our fanfiction in high regard, they must read through, understand, and remember some of it. No easy task, for sure. And I am not the go-to expert on readability. For more help, check some of the many writing blogs and author interviews out there. They also have tips for keeping your story lean. I just wanted to give you some insight as to what that may mean in our modest fandom.

Your fanfic, your rules. Just be sure that your audience knows them, too.

-Tyto