Is Fluther not a site for story reviewing?

The phrasing of your question kind of answers your own question; Fluther is promoted and known as a Q & A site, not a “story review site”.

I suspect that you might have had better luck had you posted your story elsewhere and then asked a specific question in regard to it, with a link. Questions like “How can I clarify my premise in this story?” or “What grammar mistakes did my editing miss?” make a lot more sense in a Q & A site than “Hey, look what I did.”

@syz I’m so sorry. I didn’t know that. Next time I’ll post the link to the original doc file and ask for help finding grammatical errors. Is it OK?

Why would you not put your story up on a writing web site instead of just asking the general public?

But other people have done it (written a question with a link to the story), and it’s been fine. We do have some excellent writers here.

Personally speaking I think you would get much better feedback if you post your story to a speciallist forum for fiction writers. There are some writers on Fluther (myself included) but just a small portion of an already very small community. Fluther is best suited to more specific questions such as “Is this sentence grammatically correct?”

The trouble with posting your whole story here is twofold; first, it feels as though you are breaking the “No self-promotion” rule. Second, Fluther is not a private site and it can be scraped by Google etc. Publishing your story in its entirety here will makr real publishers much less interested. Most publishers require “first rights” which means your story must not have appeared anywhere else, online or offline, before.

@downtide As for the two rules, at first I just thought it was just a normal homework question so I posted it here. I didn’t know things would get that serious

Fluther has “guidelines” to acceptable questions and posting etiquette (and language) which many mods regard as Biblical injunction as to “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not”. I don’t know what it is about being a mod that causes otherwise acceptable jellies to feel that their opinions are sacrosanct and yours are shit. It’s one of the many reasons why I’ve never wanted to be a mod and find out at first hand.

I think a perfectly acceptable question would be (and always has been) “Will you help me with my language / plotting / theme development / whatever?”, and hang whether someone else thinks your interests might be better served elsewhere.

As to @downtide‘s excellent observation, the site definitely IS scraped nearly instantaneously by other sites who harvest Fluther’s questions and answers (with many other sites) and mirror them – for whatever reason.

There’s a no self-promotion rule? How am I going to promote my salsa brand?!

Also, @Mimishu1995, you just mentioned your story was homework. Homework questions are not allowed on Fluther.

@jca Actually, they are, within limitations: Homework Questions: Feel free to ask for help on your subject, but simply posting your homework question verbatim and expecting an answer is rude! We’re not here to do your homework for you.

@syz: Ok, so maybe when she asked for people to evaluate, analyze and re-write, it was considered beyond what Fluther finds acceptable?

@jca Not being a mod, I can’t be sure, but I suspect the issue was that the extremely long story was presented as if it were details for the question. As @syz says, homework questions are certainly allowed on Fluther, although a lot of jellies don’t seem to realize this.

In your place, doing a student assignment, I would be cautious about posting a complete story anywhere online for one reason: if my teacher did a search just to see if I might have plagiarized it, he or she is going to find it. Then how would I prove I hadn’t?

It might be best to post specific question here—for instance, “Is this description clear?” and “Did I get the grammar of this sentence right?”—and not ask the members to furnish editorial services for the story as a whole. You’d be better off asking someone offline to read it.

And you probably don’t want to turn in a paper that’s too perfect to be real, do you? After all, if you have problems with certain areas of language and composition, your teacher wants to know that in order to focus on areas where you need to gain skill.

As others have pointed out, we’re happy to help you out with specific aspects (even when it’s homework), but posting the entire story and asking our members to edit it for you isn’t really appropriate here. We’re also not really the best place for getting general feedback on a story, either. A site for writers is a better bet for that. We do wish you luck, though!

Critique Circle is a great site for getting writing advice from other writers, and it’s free. I do not know their rules about getting simple proofreading, though. That might be frowned upon.