/lit/ - Literature

This gives me faith that I am a better writer than at least 90% of people

I don't think /lit/ likes green text.

>>2053923

I see what you did there.

>summer holidays at uni are fucking ages
>3 months of casual work and chilling out
>decide to take creative writing course at uni just for fun
>teacher rants on about how much they hate it when students turn in fantasy
>only one to turn in fantasy
>teacher loves it
>retracts his statement

'twas a good summer.

>>2053926
>implying that /lit/ doesn't like green text
Wait, you weren't even implying that, you were just saying it. Whatever, I just wanted to use it because /LIT/ FUCKING LOVES GREEN TEXT

>enroll in writing class
>first assignment is to write some horror shit
>ask why i have to write horror
>tells me it's the assignment and i have to do it
>ask why i'm being forced to write fiction of a certain genre that doesn't interest me and that i will never ever write ever
>tells me to do the assignment anyway
>"fuck this, i'm out of here."

>>2053934
and nothing of value was lost except perhaps for anon

>>2053934
See I think I would have actually gotten something out of that if the class were structured as a goal-oriented writing class.
>week 1: write horror and workshop all the other student's stories to see how they write horror, what worked for them, what didn't work, the usual bullshit
>week 3: write a story involving a cat
>etc.

Better than the free-for-all where you have fags turning in flash fiction, comedy and introspective dark bullshit in the same week.

>be an English major
>take creative writing classes like a man
>some bio major shows up the first day, looking confused
>he can't write
>all his stories are old-fashioned mark twainy numbers
>he criticizes everyone for writing in a contemporary style
>he comes back next semester, and the next semester, and the next
>eventually change my major to linguistics so I don't have to put up with him anymore
>turns out i don't know anything about english, and i have to start over from scratch if i want to stick with this major
>FFFFFUUUUU-

I took a creative writing course in high school. It was enough, and I will not be taking one again.

>here is an inspirational quote
>write how it makes you feel
>every day

Fuck that.

>>2053951
>>2053915
>be a creative writing teacher
>some bio major turns up, wtf
>writes in ye olde past tense
>most other students write some 'contemporary fiction' bullshit
>'contemporary fiction' kid leaves to do linguistics, nothing of value lost
>omg kill me now
>BUT THEN: 10% of students write awesome shit with samurai and robots and kawaii desu errywhere
>give them all full marks
>fuck yeah, best job in the world

>Graduate high school
>Want to be a vet
>No wait, a fireman
>No, a biologist
>No, an artist
>Continue fucking around like this for three years
>Finally decide to do a creative writing course because I write heaps anyway and want to feel like I am actually doing something

Week 3.
We had all written short stories, any genre, any length, and we had to peer-review [If you've never done this, thank your stars] with the catch that the words we used were drawn from a hat. The hat was full of positive words and you pulled them out and put them on someones story, and that was your review.

End of year one
I submitted a pretty long, almost novella, heavily stylised murder mystery. It was inspired by noir films and whatnot, and the teacher said I really captured this, but here's the kicker:

I went from 87 to 67 because, wait for it, the themes it dealt with were, and I quote, 'too mature.'

Too mature. Too mature. I've been working those words over in my head for well over a year now. Too mature.

Oh well, it's a good tax break.

>>2053984
I would bring that up with the chair. That's fucking bullshit, and there's no shame in going over someone's head.

>Experimental writing section

>Take a photo of my Dildo hanging itself in front of a suicide note.

>Get a 7 (highest mark).

I love Uni.

>>2053984
THAT IS NOT A REVIEW. I AM MAD ABOUT IT.

ALSO, unless that shit was supposed to be written for kids there is no fucking way they can take points off for being 'too mature.' You should have gone above them and challenged that shit, for sure.

>>2053995
imokwiththis.jpg

>>2053995
THIS S WONDERFUL AND I WANT YOU TO KNOW YOU ARE AN AMAZING WRITER BECAUSE I AM INSPIRED BY YOUR ORIGINALITY AND YOU ARE AMAZING BECAUSE YOU USED SUGGESTIVE THEMES WHICH IS EDGY AND COOL AND THE BAD GRAMMAR ONLY ADDS TO YOUR UNENDING GENIUS

>>2053995

>>2053995
That's actually kinda cool.

>visit a creative writing class of 200 people to plug a Nanowrimo student group
>explain the event
>leave
>zero emails expressing interest in participating

where's the heart? Where's the ambition?

>>High school creatove writing class
>>Come to class at the end of the week
>>A piece of any kind is due
>>Find a piece of scrap paper the size of a playing card
Write "I'm a frog, I like laying down you see, so when I see a place to down, I just do it."
>>After finishing it, read it to class as instructed. Lay down after reading it.
>>100%

MFW?

>>2054013
THIS S WONDERFUL AND I WANT YOU TO KNOW YOU ARE AN AMAZING WRITER BECAUSE I AM INSPIRED BY YOUR ORIGINALITY AND YOU ARE AMAZING BECAUSE YOU USED SUGGESTIVE THEMES WHICH IS EDGY AND COOL AND THE BAD GRAMMAR ONLY ADDS TO YOUR UNENDING GENIUS

>>2053984
What does the teacher's review have to do with the words out of a hat thing?

It's always possible it meant 2mature4you... like if you filled it with child murder and necrophiliac incest, but didn't show any understanding of those things.

>creative writing course
>first day
>"i want to be a writer because i want to write erotic fiction"
>everyone disgusted
>professor spends all semester trying to talk me out of it
>at workshops all they talk about is how my stories were "pointless" and "why should i care" and had "needless sex"
>7 years later
>i have published 14 short stories and 4 novels while working fulltime in a boring office job
>the joke's on them
>mfw i wish this was true

>>2054018
If that was the case the teacher should really learn to express themselves better because saying the themes were too mature does not mean what you have described.

>>2054013
>lay down after reading it

What?

>>2054023
It really showed that he felt deeply about what he was saying! You've got to have some follow through when you're performing! Have some heart to it, you know?

I also would have given high marks.

>>2053995
That's...belonging in an art gallery.

>>2054011
>explain the event

That was your first mistake. You need to learn to show-don't-tell or else you won't be taken seriously.

>>2054021
Elora's Cave

They're an electronic publisher, and they specialize in erotic fiction. Horny housewives pay a few bucks a pop per story, and it's a very lucrative business.

Also, you don't need creative writing classes to write erotic fiction. A twelve year old could write erotic fiction.

>>2054026
>>2054002
>>2054000
fags

Not me, but a girl I was friends with in college:

>creative writing major
>already have a few stories published in the college's literary journal
>self-published a novel when still in high school
>workshop a chapter from that novel
>they tear it to pieces, nobody likes it
>prof suggests rewriting it from scratch
>devastated
>decide to drop out of college
>get all the paperwork ready to withdraw from college and leave it in the registrar's inbox at the end of the day friday
>have a sudden change of heart on saturday morning and spend the rest of the weekend breaking into the registrar's office to retrieve said paperwork
>get caught and get kicked out of school anyway for tresspassing
>eventually become a junkie and only leave apartment to play mandolin on the street for change

>write poetry even though I'm better at writing prose
>hate it more than anything in the universe
>read "poetry" by people I know on Facebook
>feel better about my shitty poetry
Feels so good.

>high school creative writing class
>write shit for 3 months
>chill teacher lets us blow off the rest of the semester by doing whatever the fuck we want in that class
>I just interneted
>this other kid just worked on his math and checked emails
>pretty sure everyone just interneted too
>we all got a's and were allowed to advance

I ain't even mad.

>>2054110
>be a spoiled child born after 1990
>have laptops in high school
>have permission to use laptops during classtime

You don't know how good you had it.

>>2054094
are you me?

though facebook poets are so horrendously horrendous. I get irritated that some people call incoherent stanzas with some measure of cliche beauty poetry.

>>2054115
Not him, but I'm perfectly aware of my vast amounts of blood luxury. Hell, if we manage to out-race our self-destruction, I might even live forever.

>>2054116
Seriously.
These people cram every poetic device they ever learned about middle school into their "work," then randomly divide their shitty prose into lines and call it poetry.
I mean, just look at this shit

>>2054124
AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHH MY EYES

>>2054115

Oh I do.

>>2054124
I understand your complaint but it seems like A) they're just young and B) focusing on it at all is just as petty.

Don't like their work?
Don't read it.

I also simply accept that there is a difference between passion and hobby, and for the sake of friendships I do my best to differentiate which one they're trying for and react accordingly: Hobby gets "Yeah I like it" and passion gets real critique. The easiest way to differentiate too is the person's ability to take criticism Passion is characterized by an understanding of art forms and lack of control over audience; hobby shows in a personal defensiveness about the subject matter instead of any technical aspects.

>>2054137
this

>>2054137
>>2054137

Basically.

>>2054124
That's abysmal. An allusion to The Little Engine That Could in the second line? What's the poet's name, Little Tommy McGee? Whatever the case, I think it's nice some parents let their five-year-olds have a Facebook account.

In addition to the above silliness, the language is ugly, riddled with cliche. There's no lyricism, no rhythm, no revelation; just one malformed line after the next spewed onto the page. The sad thing is that I doubt this is the worst example of poetry from Facebook. I doubt it is even in the bottom 50% of Facebook poetry.

>>2054137
>Don't like their work? Don't read it.
Go back to Fanfiction.net, tripfag. By displaying their work in a public forum, they allow themselves to be criticized.

However, I do agree that such criticism is usually pointless in real life because having social contacts is often more important than expressing what one feels, but on the internet there are few real social contacts and even fewer ramifications for expressing unpleasant opinions. That's the way I think it should be, but what I'm trying to say is that it's pointless to make social distinctions based on real life when on the internet.

In other words: don't want to be criticized on the internet? Don't show it.

>>2054160
At least it's not in present tense.

Oh wait.

>However, I do agree that such criticism is usually pointless in real life
Some of us have real friends on Facebook. Guess you don't. Possibly a telling remark there, friend.

>>2054124
>Perks of being a wallflower fan

OH MA GAWD DA UNIVERSE IS INIFINITE

>>2054180
>Some of us have real friends on Facebook.
Reading what I wrote reveals:
>because having social contacts [in real life] is often more important than expressing what one feels
Facebook I would count among the few places that affect real social contact on the internet. I did write about the specific case of social networks, but I deleted the digression since I assumed most here weren't autistic enough to post severe poetic criticism on a friend's Facebook account. Disliking the poetry on that account isn't the same as letting them know you dislike it.

>Possibly a telling remark there, friend.
Only as telling as you want it to be, friend. The place is a breeding ground for narcissism. Then again, that's probably added value for tripfags.

>>2054205
And the entire conversation up until you came was about Facebook. That was my entire point, because that was the entire conversation.
If they're your friend on Facebook, just let it go.

You're the one spouting a bunch of other shit not at all related to what was being discussed.
They were talking about Facebook.
I was talking about Facebook.
Your point makes an exception for Facebook.
Fine, but that's not what we were talking about.


>hurr durr tripfag
Pic related. You seem like an intelligent guy, lose the last vestiges of a vestigial mentality. This ain't 2009, this ain't /b/.

>>2053933
I wish people wouldn't greentext so much. The contrast between the text and the background is so small and it's hard to read unless you highlight it and it becomes white on blue.

what are you, elderly?
>>2054216

I spent all of my Creative Writing class being deliberately sexual and freudian and my Tutor loved it.

We had various pieces of certain stories that we were given and we had to black out bits and highlight bits and then use it in a poem. I had some kids story and turned it into this.

Full praise from my Tutor. Love it.

The slow engine-sputter tugged street-side
a down-street green; lawn rub with my heel and out -
then it sailed off, drone and slave spurts of gas to
fade out this quaint monster in the plume.
Me, scrawl the dumb smile that oddly fit
with mighty fists to grope these exit memories,
lathered in the worn leather carrying regards.
Down, my castle, sleep beyond some wood white planks,
and the sailor boat that fit brutishly neighbor-side to
pry at this view - the stark bushels of shrub unkempt
by the family folk escape not on my first sight;
these feet mummified forward, jerking to race - yet lose -
to my land-sake gone from so long.

"It's so great to be back," with the street shrinking on steps,
"Feels like forever," now slight counting in the head
to number your pace carved between lines in the pavement;

"I wonder what they'll say."

Within my night return, the twists of my face filing
from comedy to tragedy, repeat, are lost.

"Or what they have said."

No know to whom be home, the light dimly plays around
my visage under the door's walkway - just near the tattled
grass, like a gross sore - to only my rushing blood knocking
away at these cheeks and the beating heart.

So close now, not a word from me,
but expectations roar and war within.

>>2054228
LolOLoL SeX aNd BOBEEES XDDDDDDD

>>2054226
No, my vision is perfectly normal. I just like to lean away from the computer while reading. It just bothers me a little bit. I'm not going to throw a fit over it tough.

>>2054236
If it bothers you you can always switch the board theme at the bottom of the page. Green and pink is easier to read.

>>2054228

Really, really funny. Post moar!

>>2054208
>And the entire conversation up until you came was about Facebook. That was my entire point, because that was the entire conversation.
No it wasn't. It had mostly been about the topic in the thread title, then it changed to this Facebook topic due to one person feeling better about his poetry after reading the even worse palbum written by friends.

You responded to someone else piling on the bad Facebook poetry with this:
>Don't like their work? Don't read it.
Considering this is the same defense that bad writers on the internet often use to avoid critique, I responded against that position. I need not go over everything afterward. You've since said you were only referring to Facebook, but your prescription was more general in the first case. This is in addition to the fact that you said complaining on this thread about it was petty, thus confirming to me that the "don't like, don't read" comment was prescribed generally rather than in the specific case of social networks.

>Pic related. You seem like an intelligent guy, lose the last vestiges of a vestigial mentality. This ain't 2009, this ain't /b/.
I only attack because I see an opening. Whether or not you are a narcissist (I doubt it but one can certainly excoriate you as such), naming yourself on an anonymous imageboard smacks to me of unwarranted self-importance. There is a place for ego, but I don't believe it's here.

Please post more stories from when you went to creative writing class.

>Be 17, senior in HS
>Be the only one with decent writing skills in a room full of jocks looking for an easy A
>Teacher starts to have me teach the class
>Graduate, be successful, and use writing for good.

>>2054297
This argument is fucking stupid. Neither one of us is fucking stupid.
Can we stop now?

>>2054308
>Graduate, be successful
PLEASE, TELL ME HOW YOU DID THAT

>>7191438
Enjoy

>>2054318
That's fine with me since the argument was derailing the thread anyway.

As for the thread topic, I was in a creative writing course during high school, but it was completely awful. No one in that class could write (and I include myself), and most recoursed to the usual angst and sadness themes that we often dawdle with in our teens.

For my own part, I clung fastidiously to writing absolute nonsense; I might have penned one serious story the whole year. I think it was a way to distinguish myself from the endless steam of rank poetry that leached out like sewage from a cracked septic tank. I suppose my experience fits with the adage that everyone thinks he can write though precious few can truly write well.

Got a Masters in creative writing. the students were unbearably pretentious with no discernible talent, but the teachers were well published, and widely respected authors. Overall, pretty cool experience.

>>2054377
My friend wants to major in Creative Writing and minor in Writing. How fucked are you, so I may either panic more or less?

>mfw I want to study creative writing but the course doesn't exist in my country

I'm forced to study comparative literature, which... well, it doesn't have as much to do with literature as the name would suggest, at all.

Yes, it kinda sucks living in a small country.

>Philosophy class in highschool
>Techer: "LOLZ write a poem about the state of humanity"
>Scrap something together over the course of 5 minutes
>No rhymes, no pattern
>Read it out for lulz
>Is in fact about procrastination and mentions fertilization
>Everyone loves it

Fucking why?

>poetry
>credible in any way as an artform

Found your problem.

>poetry
>credible in any way as an art form

Found your problem.

>Creative writing class
>everyone's favorite
>raging feminists
>everybody writes stories about themselves
>a few try to be edgy and controversial writing horrible explicit violence/sex stuff
>everyone thinks s/he's unique and special and original

>>2054423
oops:
>everyone's favorite writers/books are Chuck Palahniuk, American Psycho and LotR

>>2054381
I got a good job writing for Blockbuster. It is pretty sweet.

>>2054423
>>2054426
This right here. I'm thankful that at least the teacher didn't suck their dicks in my class. It sounds like the teacher was just another student in lots of people in this thread's classes.

small class

they wore their aspergers like a badge of honour.

they went religiously to starbucks after each lesson

90% of them were females

0% of them were good at writing.

>mfw the majority of my classmates in creative writing class just wrote shitty melodrama about dating/marriage

>>2054455
>>2054455

> 0% of them were good at writing

I lol'd.

>>2054011
Not everyone is a novel-writer... Like especially if you go into a short story class you're probably not going to get much interest. Not to mention workshop classes are about a novel's worth of writing to begin with, and since I've only come up with shit when I've done Nano, and good material in workshop classes or working independently, I'll stick with what's been working.

>enroll in creative writing course
>no one else can write
>oh well
>weeks go by; boring workshop rotations with people turning in two page scenes...
>sixth week in, new group
>wait a second, someone here can actually write!
>oh snap, and he's actually pretty good!
>maybe even better than me! wow!
>course ends
>try and keep in touch
>ask him if he's writing anything new i could take a look at
>never responds to my email
>;_;
>only people who stay in touch are people who can't goddamn write, fuck me

>>2054087
>>2054087
>>2054087
>>2054087
>>2054087
>>2054087

As a fellow writer who wants to get his work published, that was the most horrifying ending I've ever read

This thread's still up, cool!

Something that happened this week.

>Doing a course on Writing Dialogue for Screen
>Exercise for this week is writing a scene involving a Serial Killer and his Victim.
>Write a scene involving the Serial Killer courting his Victim.
>Tutor/Lecturer asks if they can put my work up on Blackboard (the class website thing) as an example.

everythingwentwell.jpg

>>2053915
>yfw when my narrative voice mentions the protagonist recalling the events in my epic, which then proceed to be told in the pluperfect.

Why do you hate the present tense so much OP? Name the last 3 good books you read that were in past tense.

And I don't see what tense has to do with the quality of the fucking writing anyway?

>>2054589
>>2054594

I have never read a good book that used the present tense throughout. Certainly no ultra gimmicky shit written entirely in the past perfect or second person or present progressive. Fuck you and your inability to understand comprehensibility.

>>2054594
>And I don't see what tense has to do with the quality of the fucking writing anyway?

Also, that sentence is not a question and shouldn't have been ended in a question mark, but rather in a period. Not like I should expect someone who writes in the present tense to understand something as basic as punctuation rules, though. Sigh...

>>2055429
>>2055429
>gimmick
>implying not awesome
Some time later God had tested Abraham, as recalled by Moses. He had said to him, “Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he had replied.

Then God had said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”

Early the next morning Abraham had gotten up and had loaded his donkey. He had taken with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham had looked up and saw the place in the distance. He had said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”

Abraham had taken the wood for the burnt offering and had placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself had carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them had gone on together, Isaac had spoken up and had said to his father Abraham, “Father?”

“Yes, my son?” Abraham had replied.

“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac had said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”

>Poetry... Everywhere, poetry.
>I fucking hate poetry.
>No assignments or discussion concerning actual stories whatsoever.

Yeah...

>>2054589
>pluperfect.
Using words like this is a hanging offense in the civilized world.

I'm glad I never considered taking any creative writing classes.

>enroll in writing class
>first writing assignment
>every student adverbs, adverbs everwhere
>OH THAT'S SO GREAT SHAQUANDRA A+ FOR YOU!"
>repeat 100x

>>2055462
Write an epic to fuck with them?

>>2055462

My courses separated poetry and fiction into their own classes. Took both, found the poetry useful, the fiction less-so.

Wasn't too painful though, except for the twilight fanfiction.

I don't understand the beef behind writing in present tense, my instructor taught us that we should write our scenes as they are happening, as if the words were painting the scene for the reader be in while they're reading it. IS there something wrong with that approach?

If OP is still around I want to know which school this was at. My experiences at University of Houston has been extremely professional professors and 2-3 talented individuals per class. Everyone else is as described here.

>>2055456
That's a perfectly pointless use of the perfect aspect, which has a real use in English to relate the event described to some prior past event. You're just using it to sound different. It's kind of like listening to a non native speaker speaking my language, neutralizing contrasts and then using them at random. That's just obnoxious.

>>2055525
There is nothing wrong with the present tense in and of itself. Its just that each tense has its own purposes to fulfill and writers more often find past tense to be better suited to their intentions.

In the community 'present tense in first person' is a joke on amateur writers because that is what everyone starts with because it is, arguably, the easiest. Scornful of newbies not of the present tense.

>>2055532
Northern Arizona University. Granted the OP story was an exaggeration... but not by much. Not by much at all.

http://amongthehogs.com/welcome/

>>2055540

Much like using the second person voice. It has a place, but in general it isn't as flexible as a third person voice.

>>2055540

Past tense in third person always felt significantly easier to me. Mainly because the other never sounded right.

>>2055537
It serves to set the action further back in time and to emphasize that the events have run their course already.

>Advanced Creative Writing Workshop.

>Three gays who write Mary Sue stories about overcoming adversity.

>One goth whose first story was told from the perspective of a squirrel.

> Four or five people who still argue with the teacher about his "no genre fiction" rule.

>MFW.

>>2055525
OP here. I like present tense for some things. It can give a sense of immediacy to your story and puts the reader right in the action. If you want to write a narrator who dies, or whose future is uncertain, then present tense does a good job of that. It can impart a very colloquial voice to your writing, which might be just what your story needed to give it that extra charm ("so the other day, I'm talking to Bill, and I says to him, I says...").

Story-telling has traditionally used the past tense because stories, whether fiction or non fiction, are assumed to have already completed, to have taken place in the past. You're telling the story because it happened and you want your reader to experience that story over again, even though they weren't there when the events in the story did happen.

Using present tense for everything might give you a few stories that just click, but most of the times, you're just using the wrong tool for the job, and your writing will suffer for it. Painters don't use narrow, hard brushes for painting the sky. They use wide ones that can apply a lot of paint at once because skies don't need a lot of detail.

>>2055593
No, that's not what the past perfect does. He's implying sequential actions with his words when there are no sequential actions in his mind.

Compare: >"I had barely gotten up when I felt an explosion imminent in my bowels"
>"I barely got up when I felt an explosion imminent in my bowels." to:

>"The Pharaohs had ruled Egypt a long time ago." (implying some further comment elucidating why this is relevant is required in the conversation)
>"The Pharaohs ruled Egypt a long time ago." (no further comment is required)

>creative writing class focused on excerpts from our novellas
>I have never written anything longer than about 20 pages
>take two of my stories and use writer's magic to stitch them together
>it looks like the start of a dual narrative story, where the stories come together later on
>too bad no one will ever read that far ahead in my story
>next workshop, the teacher wants us to submit the next 30 pages of our novella
>stitch together two completely different stories, and change the names to match what I turned in last time
>nobody notices
>mfw people love it, saying it's going to be really epic

All I remember from creative writing class was that there was this one skinny dude who always turned in really bad fantasy that had characters with names like Xzolhhhtor, Gnyzz, Faluli, Soria, and spent 2-3 pages at a time describing random battle scenes with no dialogue or mention of the characters.

>>2055735
Holy Shit, you went to school with George R.R. Martin?

>>2055760
>>2055735
>skinny dude
>George R. R. Martin

Nope. Obviously he was with Robert Jordan.

>>2055760
>skinny
>George R.R. Martin

pick one

>>2055649
Ok, I'm not going to rewrite the binding of Isaac right now because I don't have time, but you could still rewrite it in pluperfect in order to tightly sequence events and belabor (or repeat, if you will) the actions in sequence. But one thing you didn't seem to pick up on was the reference to Moses in the edited version. That is not in the original. If we are to set Moses' act of recollection in the past, then we can employ past perfect in order to maintain the relationship in time between Moses' recollection and the much more distant action of the story. Protestations against that based on an aspectual argument are no better than arguments for the narrative present rather than past. Also, his argument mentioned perfective aspect. Strictly speaking, perfective aspect is not a part of Germanic languages. We call it perfect because the western tradition of grammatical writings is rooted in the examination and teaching of Latin over thousands of years. We have structures that look similar, and our grammarians have called them by the same name. They aren't the same though.

>>2055796
First of all, get your terminology straight. "Pluperfect" and "past perfect" are two terms for the combination of tense and aspect in English. "Perfect" refers to an English aspect formed with the auxiliary verb "have" and the past participle of the main verb. In English, there are "past perfect" (had written), "present perfect" (has written), and "future perfect" (will have written) aspects. "Perfective" is a term that equates in English grammar with the "simple past" (i.e. he wrote) and is NOT the same thing as English "perfect" aspect; nor is this term used by educated people to refer to it.

I still think you don't understand the difference here.
>but you could still rewrite it in pluperfect in order to tightly sequence events and belabor (or repeat, if you will) the actions in sequence.
It's not just about being in a sequence. There has to be meaning behind the events, some connection or relation to another event that links them semantically.

Take another look at the examples in >>2055649.
>"I had barely gotten up when I felt an explosion imminent in my bowels"
>"I barely got up when I felt an explosion imminent in my bowels."
Both of these work. The waking up can precipitate an explosion in your bowels, or they could be unrelated. If they are linked, then the first sentence is preferred. If they are not linked, the first sentence wouldn't sound right. Compare:
>"I had gotten up out of my bed when a hunter in the backcountry of Canada lit a cigarette."
>"I got up out of my bed when a hunter in the backcountry of Canada lit a cigarette."
Here, the first sentence is ill-formed because the reader will not understand the connection between waking up and some stranger on the other side of the world lighting a cigarette. They both happened at the same time and that's it.

>>2055796
First of all, get your terminology straight. "Pluperfect" and "past perfect" are two terms for the same combination of tense and aspect in English. "Perfect" refers to an English aspect formed with the auxiliary verb "have" and the past participle of the main verb. In English, there are "past perfect" (had written), "present perfect" (has written), and "future perfect" (will have written) aspects. "Perfective" is a term that equates in English grammar with the "simple past" (i.e. he wrote) and is NOT the same thing as English "perfect" aspect; nor is this term used by educated people to refer to it.

I still think you don't understand the difference here.
>but you could still rewrite it in pluperfect in order to tightly sequence events and belabor (or repeat, if you will) the actions in sequence.
It's not just about being in a sequence. There has to be meaning behind the events, some connection or relation to another event that links them semantically.

Take another look at the examples in >>2055649.
>"I had barely gotten up when I felt an explosion imminent in my bowels"
>"I barely got up when I felt an explosion imminent in my bowels."
Both of these work. The waking up can precipitate an explosion in your bowels, or they could be unrelated. If they are linked, then the first sentence is preferred. If they are not linked, the first sentence wouldn't sound right. Compare:
>"I had gotten up out of my bed when a hunter in the backcountry of Canada lit a cigarette."
>"I got up out of my bed when a hunter in the backcountry of Canada lit a cigarette."
Here, the first sentence is ill-formed because the reader will not understand the connection between waking up and some stranger on the other side of the world lighting a cigarette. They both happened at the same time and that's it.

> be a computer science major
> need to take more credits to maintain financial aid
> take Creative Writing for the lulz
> have only taken technical writing before
> discover that I only do fiction well when high on opiates
> pass class by virtue of heroin

feels good man, up until WDs

>>2055708
>creative writing class
>oh boy, peer reviews
>reading boring story
>there's a sentence that makes no god damn sense, no matter how many times I reread it.
>point this out to the author
>"oh yeah, I wasn't sure how to explain this, so I intentionally wrote something that didn't make any sense. Authors do that all the time."
>ಠ_ಠ

>>2056047
I actually had my professor ask me after class what I had been doing when I wrote one of the stories I turned in. I'm not sure if he wanted me to share it with him or what, but since I'd written it sober, I just said weed.

>>2056061
>ಠ_ಠ
I involuntarily made that same face

>>2056073
The difference between weed and heroin is that, when you write on weed, it sounds brilliant at the time -- and shit when sober. When you write on heroin, it is good while high, and then when sober it seems godlike. This is why all the best music is written on opiates, for example.

>>2056107
>[citation needed]
For science
Not that I don't believe you.

>>2056112

Due to the illegality, there aren't any studies, but I think most artists will tell you that heroin (so long as you aren't dominated by the addiction, or until you are) increases creativity, or at least helps numb other distractions.

Personally, I write poetry much better under it. Sober, I can't hardly write it -- I get caught up in the mechanics, like rhyme and meter, and come across with a strange diction and without conveying the message I wanted. Under opiates, the words just sort of flow out of my hands, although I tend to write much darker.

>>2056129

Post some of your poetry and let us be the judge of this. If you've written something awesome on Heroin then I'll believe it.

>Creative Writing in high school
>Everyone is in there because they have a hardon for the teacher and because he is "fun"
>Do like three assignments involving short stories
>Nobody cares
>Instead of a final we have to participate in a lip-synching music video
Fucking high school. So glad that piece of shit got fired two years later.

>>2056135
> post something on 4chan that a google search will relate to my real name, phone number, and school

riiight

>>2056144

>2011
>Posting your phone number online.

>Implying anyone would care enough about some random jerk on /lit/ with bad poetry

>Implying you have posted everything you have ever written online.

Don't be a pussy about it.

>>2056136
I know that feel, getting cheated.
I'd take a strict teacher that loves the subject over a faggot "cool guy" wannabe any day.

>In college, sign up for Creative Writing II with my best friend
>Professor makes me drop the class because I didn't take Creative Writing I
>Am sad
>Two weeks later, best friend comes in with something to peer review, shows it to me, it is terrible and there is no constructive criticism that could possibly help
>He tells me this is one of the better authors in the class, the others just write bad genre fiction or faux-artsy 'real life' stories
>One lady writes obsessive sex stories about other people in the class but gives them different names, writes scary S&M fic about a character based on the professor
>Suddenly glad I was kicked out of the class
>Never try taking creative writing again, get Literature degree instead, which actually helps my writing

>>2056144

I've posted my email over on /jp/ and sold some light novels to a bro across the pond through paypal.

>>2055470
I completely disagree. It's refreshing to meet someone who actually knows what pluperfect means.

>>2056176

But he didn't know what it meant...

>be senior in high school
>be head of submissions in our lit mag, meaning i have to sort through everyone's work and decide what to show the rest of the lit mag
>pity me

one example
>"yo we got 500 entries from botton's class that need to be sorted by tomorrow"
>you'vegottobefuckingkidding.jpeg
>read first one, its a girl literally talking shit about an ex and pressing the enter button to try and make it not prose
>"i cant believe you
>slept with her you fucking
>piece of shit, if i knew
>you were going to do that
>then i wouldnt have dated you obviously,
>you pig.
>fuck you"
>jesus christ thank god thats over, lets go to the nex-
>she wrote five more

all of my hate

i have more stories too

>>2056344
THEN SUPPLY US WITH MORE
FAGGOT

>>2056352
just wanted to be sure you enjoyed the first one

>towards the end of the year, mag is due in a week and were really behind
>everyone is giving me and the head graphic designer shit since we basically run the place.
>be in room two which cant see room one where everyone that isnt working is in
>here loud crash
>go into other room and see friend of mine slam his head into a wall, scream, and run outside
>see his ex looking like a frightened bitch
>apparently she had just started dating his best friend and the two sat next to each other right in front of said friend
>everyone looks at me and the teacher
>lolfuckthisleaveroom
not a single fuck was given that day

it has a happy ending, me, the friend, and his best friend are still all good friends and love to talk about this while drinking. apparently the girl manipulated the best friend

>>2056361
This is neither a story about creative writing class, nor an example of one of the submissions you got to your zine.

>>2056382
so sue me, its one of the funnier things that happened in the class

>going through submissions, read one of the last ones for that day
>"fuck this assignment, im only writing and submitting this because my teacher made me. fuck you guys you are all pretentious fucks and your opinions mean nothing at the end of the day"
>well fuck you too buddy

>go on a date with the graphic design girl, pretty obvious she likes me
>in class the next day and were going over one of the few raps that were submitted, im pretty excited
>its a decent rap about marijuana and how people should respect it more
>very direct, very tell and not show, no allusions, but the rhythm and flow are nice
>graphic design girl tells the submitter who happens to be in our class what she doesnt like about it, spending about 10 minutes talking about metaphors and abstract language which most of the submitters that submitted rap arent too fond of
>kid says "lol fuck that"
>i laugh
>she mad
>uh oh

bump for more stories!

>never took a creative writing class in high school or college
>tried to enroll many times, but they always only offered like 1 section at a time, and it filled up really quickly
>always wanted to write, but life got in the way
>finally graduate, entered the work force
>life is boring, so I find a community writing group
>kind of like a club, meets once a week on Wednesday evenings
>the group leader emails me the story to read for that week and I prepare a 1 page double-spaced list of comments, per her instructions
>first day
>nobody shows but me and one other guy
>we talk a little bit about the story, but it quickly became apparent that he didn't read it all the way through because he didn't know how it ended
>the woman who I'd contacted via email was nowhere to be found
>next week it's just me
>the following week I didn't even go

And that's my creative writing class story. ;_;

>>2056636

>intermediate creative writing class
>workshops!
>all the girls write about some drama based on their dating life, or some drama about a little girl's daddy dying, sob story fuckfest
>all the guys (lol, all 2 of them) write about sports or their hobbies (which are also sports)
>i wrote a nice mystery about a man bank robber with a split personality
>who does the teacher bitch and complain about?
>me, for writing genre-fiction
>fuck this shit, i'm out of here
>drop the class midway through the semester and took a W on my transcript

>>2056658
>sob story fuckfest
>a man bank robber

I guess you didn't get any suggestions for your bizarre way of talking, huh.

>>2056658
Are you a man or a woman, because your post implies neither.

>ENG 2310W Intro to Prose Writing
>time to turn in my submission
>first 12 pages are a normal story about a germaphobe taking a dump in a public toilet
>last 8 pages are harry potter fanfiction where harry and hermione kiss, and ron makes a pass at ginny
>complete accident
>didn't notice until the day of the workshop
>everybody is snickering
>i think it's because my story about pooping was funny
>turns out the entire discussion time is spent shipping harry with ginny and ron with hermione
>i have no idea what's going on and interrupt them
>"excuse me, but what the hell is everyone talking about?"
>somebody tells me to read page 13
>my face when
>OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE????

>>2056663
Middlesex

>>2056679
This is good and I enjoy it.

>>2053915
Rather than calling them fuckheads, why don't you try writing in the present tense and see if you can write a better story than they were able to?

>>2056658
That's the sad state of things.

Well written genre fiction is supposedly shitty because it's "cliche", but write some slice of life bullshit about how important your sister's argument was and suddenly pass down the fucking Writer's Awards.

Yeah, I'm bitter about my Writing major. As much as I love writing, I hate being judged by people who can't look past what genre I'm in.

>>2054087
Fucking lol'd.

That story was made up, right? Cos if not, I'll feel bad.

>>2056697

>Well written genre fiction is supposedly shitty because it's "cliche", but write some slice of life bullshit about how important your sister's argument was and suddenly pass down the fucking Writer's Awards.

But it's ART! Enjoyable things can't be art. Everybody knows that.

>>2055983
I repeat, shithead. English (along with the other Germanic languages) doesn't have perfective aspect. Deal with it. We have the the grammatical forms that look similar to perfects that other languages have, but they don't carry
the function. English "he ate his mother's shit" and "he has eaten his mother's shit" don't have a difference in meaning. In Latin, the difference has to do with degree of completion (hence the term "perfection") This is why Latin teachers will teach you to translate the imperfect as "he was eating his mother's shit" and the perfect as "he ate his mother's shit." The teacher wants you to do this so that you demonstrate to him that you understand that with Latin the perfect implies completion of the act. This is not the case in the Germanic languages. "He ate shit" and "He has eaten shit" shit can be argued to bring different flavor to the action, but what it doesn't do is serve as a marker of aspect. In fact, students of German are taught that the distinguishing feature between the imperfect and the perfect in that language is that the perfect is typically for conversation and the imperfect is for narration.

>end up taking a evening writing class to fill out my transcript
>class is full of middle-aged women who have been taking it for the last 7 years
>prof is a devout christian sunday school teacher
>class is on poetry
>go in expecting absolute shit
...
>end up writing massive epic poetry pieces taking themes from christian mythology
>holy fuck this isn't that bad
>class worships my every move
>prof ends up nominating me as #1 student
>mfw

Really enjoying this thread /lit/erati. I'm starting my first creative writing class this semester, so hopefully I'll have stories of my own. Friend's take on creative writing classes:

>Every "terrible" type of person in class is also really funny so don't worry about your classmates and just enjoy it.

Which seems to be the case in these stories. I'm excited.

>enrol in creative writing class
>first task is writing an introduction to a prose text
>write a page about an old man going a day without his nurse
>receive valuable criticism
>improve introduction significantly
>everything went better than expected

>first day of college
>taking some class on poetry for my English major
>teacher talks about her astrological sign and studentss start talking about astrology in depth
>teacher asks me what sign I am
>"I don't pay attention to super-stitious gobbley-gook, particularly sucker-fare bullshit like astrology."
>I wish, what actually happens:
>"Cancer"
>"Oh wow, some of my best friends are cancers"
>tell her all my best friends have cancer
>dismissed for the rest of the semester as the mean-spirited douche who prefers Camus to "slam poetry"

I miss the 20th century.

>>2057122
Astrology was so much better then.

>>2057126
heh

>Taking a poetry writing class at college
>Workshopping our poetry one day
>Some other student reads his work
>It's all self-indulgent emotional Linkin Park bullshit
>Everyone else is praising him and stroking his ego
>I go all Simon Cowell on him and give him my honest opinion
>He gets all mad and defensive
>My face when

I may not be the best writer on Earth, but you don't have to be good to know what bad is, and his stuff was AWFUL.

This is a good thread and anti-cancer, I'm gonna have to give this a bump.

>Read whole thread
>>2056162
>>2056679 "complete accident" - lolwut?
>>2057122
>mfw

I only wish I had something to contribute.

>>2057062

You're just reiterating that you don't fully understand the subject-matter. I'd recommend reading the Wikipedia articles about these subjects before you use college level words like "perfective," "perfect," "aspect," and "meaning."

>each week I read four stories and two of the three were always confusing messes of my-boyfriend-left-me melodrama
>one was always some sort of Jack Kerouak spoof (or however you spell that name) that tried to be really pre-modern and edgy, but ended up just being shallow and boring
>the fourth story was the wild card
>some weeks, it was so forgettable that I had to write my critique while actually re-reading it
>other weeks, it was really unique and good
>one week it was about this fat guy who lost his shirt when he was walking home from work and some high schoolers picked on him. he had to take the bus home because they also took his car keys. he had enormous man-boobs and sweat a lot, leaving sweat stains everywhere he sat
>funny as shit. i can't stop laughing.
>i went to class prepared to laud my praise on the author during the workshop
>everybody hates it
>when I "beg to differ," they argue with me and refute my points one-by-one
>the favorite story for that week was another Jack Keroack rip-off that had made my eyes bleed trying to finish it the previous night
>i shit all over it during the workshop, doing my best to refute the points of the people who shit on the fat guy story

Such was the drama of my creative writing class in college.`

I smiled quite a bit reading these stories, and hope most of them aren't true. Bumping for great justics.

>>2058826
I'm reiterating because you ignore the point and launch into bullshit because you're a pedantic fuckwit who likes to hear himself talk (or should I say read himself type?). There is no perfect aspect in English. You might like to pretend there is, but there isn't.

>You're just reiterating that you don't fully understand the subject-matter. I'd recommend reading the Wikipedia articles about these subjects before you use college level words like "perfective," "perfect," "aspect," and "meaning."
Take your own advice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfective_aspect
"English has neither a simple perfective or imperfective aspect; see imperfective and perfective for some basic English equivalents of this distinction."

You fucking retard!

>>2059166
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_%28grammar%29

Yeah it absolutely does

What is it about women that inhibits them from being creative? I think it's the ovaries.

>>2058826
I suggest you read the following.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_verbs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic#Verbs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_verb

>>2059174
It has the structure. It does not have the aspect. Read the other wikipedia links.

>>2059178
He was mostly right the first time (equating perfective to past perfect isn't "correct" but it's as close as English has). This has nothing to do with the development of the English language and no wikipedia article is going to properly do all of that justice anyways. Give it up; you sound like an idiot.

>>2059180
There is no reason for me to read those other wikipedia links because they are completely irrelevant. "Perfect" is an aspect in English. You are simply incorrect.

>>2059186
No. You are incorrect because you fail to understand what it really means for a verb to have perfect aspect. You need to spend less time with writing profs and more time with historical linguists.

>>2059184
>mostly right
That's called wrong.

>>2059188
I'd love to hear your explanation for why historical linguists would be most useful for explaining the grammar of my contemporary language.

Of course, you are not a linguist and I'm sure you know none. But really, I'd love a good essay on how our perfect aspect disappeared.

>>2059184
How can the development of the English language not be related to the development of the group of languages to which it belongs? Where else would we look for the development of the English language?

>>2059195
Because that is irrelevant to whether or not the perfect aspect exists in the language we speak today. If you could accept that you're taking an impossible stance, then maybe we could talk about why, which is when the development of English would be a relevant topic.

I think we can all read wikipedia though.

>>2059193
I'd like to see an essay on exactly what you think perfect means.

>>2059197
It's not irrelevant. It is formative. The fact that you don't know the history of your language does not change the fact that the history of your language forms how it is. Your language lost perfective aspect hundreds of years ago but left behind vestigial forms. These vestigial forms may "feel different" but that doesn't make them perfective in aspect. You mistake the vestigial form for a functionally different form because you are ignorant of the history of these forms, and then when someone points this out to you rather than achknowledge the truth you dismiss it as irrelevant.

>>2059204
Yeah, no kidding. There's a difference between perfect and perfective. (Hint: we've still got one!)

>>2059206
Ok, so what's the difference?

>>2059211

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=what%27s+the+difference+betwee
n+the+perfect+and+perfective+aspect&oq=what%27s+the+difference+between+the+perfect+and+perfectiv
e+aspect&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=31l11848l0l11942l76l66l4l42l44l4l335l4885
l0.5.11.4l20l0

>>2059214
You won't answer because you still can't face admitting that I'm right.

>do joint Film & Lit degree at one of the country's best unis
>course has no practical elements to it, all theory
>because of a dispute between the film and english departments stretching back into the 70s (eng dept. didn't think film/tv was valid as seperate degree) our 'core' lit modules are run by the german dept. and so we have 3 years of kafka/brecht/holocaust
>still get to take proper modules with eng. dept. though, only we're not allowed to take any creative writing modules
>I'm ok with this
>because i'm not a faggot who needs an entire module/degree dedicated to learning how to not suck at writing; that's something to be developed on my own time, parallel to what I learn from actual study

>>2053934

Wow, /tg/ was right. You really are all pretentious fucks who spend your time arguing about pointless shit that no-one else cares about.

>>2059279
>>2059279
Do you think English will have the same functional grammar in the YEAR 40,000!!!?

>>2059279
/tg/ too? I thought it was just /b/. Who the fuck is trying to spread hatred for /lit/ onto the other boards? Every board looks like shit after just a cursory glance and every board has bullshit threads that get 200+ replies.

>In Fiction Writing Course right now
>We had to write our favorite books and authors
>At least 75% of the class had Vonnegut in the top three

Soniamproud.jpg

>Professor insists there's nothing magical about writing
>You just write and write and its hard fucking work
>Has mentioned many times how evil -ly adverbs are
>Gave a long, fairly in-depth presentation on character and motivation

everythingisgoingbetterthanexpected.jpg

>High School Writing Course
>Class discussion on genre writing
>specifically Sci-Fi
>Girl in the back has sudden outburst
>WHAT IS THIS SEE-FEE I'VE NEVER HEARD OF IT
>Other girls in class chime in they don't know either
>With Lit bros in the corner our faces when

That class has me horrified for the future of literature.

>Senior-level Creative Writing workshop.

>People still turn in stories that are told from the perspective of animals.

I seriously hope you guys don't do this.

>>2059385
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.

Nothing at all.

In fact... Bark!!! Bark bark!!!! Meow!!!!! ^¥^

>creative writing class
>applied for shits and giggles
>first assignment, I hand in a chapter of The Great Gatsby
>get a D
>start shit up, ask why
>expect "it's not your work, but D for bravery"
>get "not very interesting, metaphors are meaningless and illogical, dialog is unrealistic"
>mfw he hasn't read Gatsby
>next assignment, pushing my luck, hand in the last chapter of Norwegian Wood
>no way he hasn't read it
>get an A
>WAT
>hand in 6 more such "works", get B's and A's
>everyone else knows, keeps quiet
>one butthurt asshole with a failing grade snaps and snitches on me in front of the class
>teacher obviously dumbfounded, but tries to play it cool
>"I know, I knew all along. a brilliant example of the post and post-post-modern"
>WAT
>everyone's pissed at... ME?

>>2059385
vile has a point here

although I'm sure it's irritating as fuck

>>2059398
Stupid faggot.

>Write poetry.
>Let others read poetry.
>People look down on you for poetry.
>I laugh in those people's face for being such pussies.

Oh, these are all poems about torture and c. Not a happy one in the bunch. And all this from a newfag with no prior writing experience.
>Feels good.

>>2059407
Woof! Woof! Bark! *gnawwwww*


Spunk covered little white worms slithering in an out of my cock hole. I am being consumed.

>>2059417
Stupid faggot.

Sorry >>2053915 I only use future tense.
>Wins every award in literature twice.

>>2059404
Community college?

>>2059440
sadly, yes.

>>2059443
I'm just trying to quickly get a law degree so that I can return to being a lawyer.

>take creative writing
>Chuck norris jokes are in
>write a parody of the devil and tom walker titled "The Devil and Walker: Texas Ranger
>Fill it with chuck norris jokes and "simpsons style" humor
>Thought it was cliche and terrible, this humor style has been done to death
>everyone loves it
>Submit it to literary fair
>Win

What a joke.

>>2059446
I'm there because I got caught popping pills and no real college will admit me.

So guys, as somebody who's just starting an English course and has a writing workshop this week, what should I do to make the most of it?

>Forced to join some kind of extra class.
>Decide to go to writing, because the other option was "music"
>Everyone is writing murder mysteries, high-school dramas or are starting on 50.000 page fantasy novels or are doing literally nothing.
>Write about sexy espers fighting crime in space
>Receive 5+
>AHAHAHA, oh wow!

>>2059515
Don't share your experience in that class on your admissions essay. While it demonstrates your need for a better institution quite well, it also highlights a lack of academic integrity.

>>80% of the students write their stories in present tense

Why is this a bad thing?

Dammit, I wish I was taking a creative writing class right now. I would write some fucked up shit.

>writing forum
>write stories
>have a female friend who introduced me to this forum
>of course she also writes stories there
>she always gets high scores ( there is a score system, kinda like voting and giving positive or negative karma )
>a lot of users have their statistics in their signature
>i only get medium to "fuck off"-votes
>okay. lets do this. buy books on writing and stuff, read more books and about writers, work my shit like no tomorrow
>my final story gets barely any votes
>get a PM from a female member - turns out she is some sort of germanistic literature professor and liked my story very much. she advices me to stop publishing in this forum and send it to her per mail, she will give me critique. Ms. Professor also tells me that this forum is mostly visited by dudes and that they vote females higher.
>we exchange mail for some weeks
>after some months of silence her father sends me a mail telling me she died in a car accident

The world of literature is a cruel mistress.

>>2059645
Abaha that's hilarious. Guess that's what we in the business call, a sticky situation!!! :'DDDD

>>2059645

Do you mind sharing which forum it is?

>>2059650

The fuck?

hi /lit/ Im doing a module in this next year and I have to admit that my writing is effectively modernist, i.e. emphasis on formal aestheticism and impersonality; is this way too derivative and will it yield not high marks? should I go for 'originality' (i.e. gimmicks) instead?

>>2059645
I bet your shits great dude; also you may not agree with mu cultural theoretical views but the marketisation of literature makes for more imminent 'popular' literature; tldr- your work is too deep for that faggy forum

>>2059656

Actually i don't want to share it. I don't want people to go anywhere near it. Its a non-english forum and its prime time is over.

>>2059667

I don't know if my shit is great. What drives me and how i write and what people like it or how they read it are completely different things. But what she wrote was not awful in a general sense - it was just pretty generic and "dramatic lovestory" shit. Oooh! The charming thief and the ghost lady, they can never be together! Something like that. ( altough she could write really great descriptions of rooms and landscapes, i give her that )

It sucked so much because they praised her so hard just because she had tits.

>first year of cw
>teacher is some dumb bitch
>all of my submissions are just ahort stories about neckbeards and teir attempts to live like normal people
>pass with 51and 54 respectively
> year 2 cw
> its some chill as fuck stoner prof
> he thinks im a genius
>im just mocking my lifestyle from 2006/7
>get a 97, all the other students get 60~ or so percent and tells them all to relax


indont even know what happened

>In high school, doing GCSEs
>Idiot dyslexic friend writes the worst story I've ever read, tons of misspellings, blatantly ripped off from Watchmen, some parts are almost incomprehensible
>Teacher inexplicably thinks he's a genius, tells him it's amazing, ego expands exponentially, becomes incredibly critical of other people's stuff
>Gets in a major huff when I try to give him constructive criticism
>mfw he get's a D for EngLang over all (and I get A*)

>took a creative writing class back in HS
>4/5 of the class are teenage girls writing cliche fantasy/animu bullshit
>teacher absolutely hates cliches
>they all fail
>everyone else unconsciously switches between tenses/stocks up on obnoxiously cumbersome adverbs
>write (what I thought at that time to be) a comedic deconstruction of cape comics
>get a B
>feelsgoodman

There was one guy who always wrote about the everyday lives of people living in a incredibly surreal, almost drug-induced fantasy land and generally mocked our classmates while still retaining some actual quality. Looking back, I've realized his stuff was chock-full of references to post-modern literature (a la Pynchon, DFW, Gaddis) and paid homage to European, Russian and Japanese animation (ie The Triplets of Belleville, Mind Game, Yellow Submarine). I'm pretty sure there were a few nods to Neutral Milk Hotel in there, too.

I don't know what happened to that kid. He moved away halfway through the year and I never found a way to contact him since. And there's barely a chance of stumbling across any of his books because he said he'd publish his stories under a pen name, if at all.

>>2059768
>everyone else unconsciously switches between tenses/stocks up on obnoxiously cumbersome adverbs

>>2054505
Blackboard? Do you go to UofL?

>>2059774
lol I saw that too (I'm sure it was "on purpose")

>>2060741
>thinks his school is the only university that uses blackboard

>high school creative writing class
>given writing prompts bi-weekly
>always try to find loopholes in the requirements
>teacher absolutely loves me

>summer classes at Washington University in STL
>have a really difficult Chem class, so don't really work very creatively on my writing, mostly about my childhood and philosophies from rural life
>ass-clown bro writes "edgy" stories
>prof loves him, lets him read aloud
>he wrote and orated a story about a high school girl masturbating to The Crow and then killing herself

>actual college class
>writan
>accolade gettan
>student journal publishan

blackboard and angel can go fuck

>be poetry major at Ivy League school (CW)
>be white
>be assigned very respected poet as my major adviser by default. He happens to be black.
>no argument on my behalf because I don't care he's respected so cool.
>write senior thesis portfolio of poems
>best writing I'd done yet, literally years of work and polishing in workshop and no major complaints from prof at any point
>poems are about the ocean and feminine energy and Jungian archetypes and not about race whatsoever BTW, just sayan
>final review time, 1 on 1 with professor 3 months before graduation
>adviser says he hates my traditionalist adherence to form and poetic structure and I am propagating a conservative racist Albionist machine etc etc and he will never give me a passing grade because my poems embrace form and the fascist machine that accompanies it.
>Me: can we agree to disagree on that?
>Him: No u racist
> Me: Panic.exe
>save my poems in their real version and submit a BS watered down version for final portfolio
>Prof fails me on my final portfolio because according to him I sold out and pandered to an audience.
>Prof goes on sabbatical to Africa for 5 years and cannot be contacted
>I do not graduate
>Still in debt 5 years later and have no diploma because of this man
>This is entirely 100% true.
> My prof's FW

We racist now. Really.

I love how in these stories, everyone tries to imply that everyone is bad at writing except for themselves.
Hilarious.

>>2060779
Hornbuckle?

>>2054087
Unh...not to be insensative or anything, but you mind if I steal that outline for the first half of a novel? Cause seriously, slap a truimph-of-the-spirit comeback on to that and it has NY Times bestseller written all over it.

>>2060781
That's your fault for not reaching out to other people in the college. Shit ain't fair and wouldn't have gone down like that.

>>2060781
did you mean CU? what is CW?

I don't know about the present tense. I tend to write short stories and novellas that take place in the present day, and there's usually unclear motivations or purposes or plotlines that I want to reveal in their own time. Writing about things like they have already happened takes away some of the immediacy and suspense, at least for me. I don't 'naturally' write in past tense. Right now I'm working on a first-person present-tense thing, and I really don't see it working any other way as it's about an elderly man being harrassed by either hallucinatory or real little cherub figures that seem to allude to a past he insists has been perfectly innocent. In reading, too, I prefer the present tense - very few people do it but it just works so much better for me.

>>2054124
C-cancer...

bomp

>>2053995

>>2059385

Ever read any Jack London, faggot?

>>2060812

I don't plan to do anything with it, but if you haven't already guessed, it's already a work of fiction, so be aware that you're asking not to steal a true story, but a made-up one.

>>2059166
>>2059172
>>2059178
>>2059180
>>2059186
>>2059188

There are a few rather serious problems with your logic. First, Proto-Indo European split from what became English over 5000 years ago, and Proto-Germanic split from what became English over 2000 years ago. Both are very long periods of time for a language. 5000 years is more than enough time for major changes in a language's grammar to occur, including the tense, aspect and mood system. Languages like Gaelic and Modern Spanish have this thing called the "imperfect," a combination of tense and aspect depicting a habitual or on-going event in the past, but English lost it long ago. 2000 years is a long time as well, and can result in drastic changes like the development of what we might consider such basic grammar as the indefinite article.

Modern linguistics is concerned with analyzing each language as a complete and independent system. The notion that everything should be compared with Latin (or if not Latin, then to some other "mother" language) is out-of-date, was never actually based on any linguistic theory, and isn't considered a legitimate method by any modern linguist. Such comparisons aren't worth much because they use bad frames of reference (i.e. a completely different language).

In much the same way I don't try to convince Evangelists that God doesn't exist, I have no interest in making you believe that the perfect aspect exists. If you weren't satisfied with either Wikipedia's entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_aspect)) >The perfect is formed in English by conjugating the auxiliary verb "to have" and then appending the verb's past participle form. or my simple explanation >>2055983 that even an ESL student could understand, then there's no help for you.

Just stop making real linguists look bad by working yourself up into a rage over basic facts and spouting non-factual information instead of educating yourself.

>High school, write an essay about social and economic equality in Finnish class
>Title: <Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels>
>liberal as fuck; arguing about income distribution, widening wealth gap, cuts in education, basically pissed off venting
>I return it, teacher finds me in the hallway a couple of days later, shakes my hand, tells me it was the greatest essay she had ever read by any student in her 30 year career. Gave me A+++
>I was 17.
>Read it again when I was 25.
>naive, overly simplified, incoherent structure...
>only good thing about it is that it flows well, a bit like angry rap lyrics

>While reading that essay, I also stumbled upon something I wrote when I was 9-10
>A poem where every line starts with the letters of ABC, like A = line, B = line etc
>fucking surreal, perfect flow, rhymes, brilliant
>mfw I peaked early and it has been downhill since

>>2061180
Yes, Call of the Wild was very popular in 5th grade.

>>2061259
Lol! My teacher said that about my A level coursework. I felt like a fucking superhero.

> was a bio major
> enjoyed writing, and enrolled in a creative writing class
> class introductions
> everybody was an english major or some other liberal arts major
> nobody could figure out why a bio major enrolled (was it an accident? are you in the wrong room?)

> semester went on
> no instruction on how to write, in the elements of a story, or how to write a good character
> teacher just assumed we all had diaries full of perfect characters and that we all had imaginary friends when we were little

> pretty much straight into work-shops
> 80% of the students wrote their stories in present tense
> 10% tried to pull off some sort of battle manga/japan-is-katana bullshit
> 10% turned in single-page incomprehensible "poetry", for lack of a word, even though it was a prose class
> continued through the college's Intro, Intermediate, and Advanced Creative Writing classes
> all that changed was that at the advanced level, 100% of the students wrote in present tense

Happy now?

Holy fuck.

I am a bio major too and I enrolled in a creative writing class as well...

In middle-school we would get writing assignments and I'd do some sort of weekly horror story about a classmate. Usually this person died or stumbled upon some sort of mystery. One kid in class played tennis, so I wrote about how he participated in a tennis tournament and was defeated by a mystical stranger in the final. His body would "freeze" when the stranger looked at him. Later there was held a party for all the players and my classmate wanted to congratulate his mysterious adversary so they went into a separate room for some reason. Alone in the room the stranger rips apart his mouth (to make it bigger) and devours my classmate. Poignant stuff. The weird thing is that my teacher read most of them out loud.

>be doing eng lit/lang GCSE
>there is creative writing coursework
>time alocated: 3 weeks
>quickly scrible some trippy shit over the course of 3 nights
>hand in
>teacher fucking loved it
>got A* for it
>feelsgoodman.jpg

>CW, college
>We're told to start writing a novel
>See diversity. Some people do thrillers, others do fantasy, others do historical fiction, others do DEEP psychological mind-drills.
>Decide for a story about political intrigue with an alien race, with a space opera plot going on in the backround.
>Make a complicated system of deities and worshipers, prophets and Gods and so on.
>It's just to add consistency to the terminology and motivations
>Submit the "novel"
>Random works get read out loud (drawing from a hat)
>Who gets read? Yours truly.
>Excited for critique and opinions
>14 out of the 24 people in the class decide it's a hateful metaphor for Christianity, FOURTEEN OF THEM, WHET THE FUCK?
>Bash me for it
>People come to my defense
>Flame war like I'm in highschool
>Prof gives me a C for "writing on controversial topics.
>Fuck me

>>2062007
>14 out of the 24 people in the class decide it's a hateful metaphor for Christianity, FOURTEEN OF THEM, WHET THE FUCK?

Why did they think that? Was it?

>>Prof gives me a C for "writing on controversial topics.
Terrible. You should protest like he other guy in the thread.

>>2062007
>>2062080
seriously, protest. that's a bunch of bullshit. i suppose they think star wars, harry potter, dune, lord of the rings, and narnia are all hateful towards christianity too.

this is why I don't go to college.

>>2062080
It really wasn't.
Well, it wasn't my intention at least, it didn't even cross my mind.
But when you think about it, id does put the religion I created in a very subjective light. While people may or may not associate withe the religion's ideals, I really didn't think they'd think I was writing about a real religion. Something to keep in mind, just in case.

Well, that was a long time ago, besides I got the critique I really needed from it. I stayed in the class and got As for almost all the short stories I've written for them. It was a valuable experience.

The prof that year was a total moron, though.

>>2062007
Excellent work, dude. You got detractors and defenders! Most people couldn't get anyone to give a shit about what they write.

>join creative writing society
>meet the members
>two are writing young adult fiction
>one is writing chick lit
>three are writing fantasy
>two are writing sci-fi
>one is writing misery lit

Sigh...

>>2061228
There are a few serious problems with your reading comprehension because you sometimes attribute to me things I never said or implied. Elsewhere you seem to be taking issue with other things. So I'll take you point by point.


It is not ridiculous to point out when something happened just because it happened long ago. As you noted, Spanish has a real imperfect and real perfect, meaning that these two tenses are differentiated from each other in meaning rather than style. Latin also has a real perfect and real imperfect. The former for actions that have been completed, the latter for actions that have only been partially completed. We are in agreement on this. What you seem to object to is my tracing this development to the era of proto-germanic (which contrary to your assertion did not split from what became English but rather divided into East, West, and North Germanic) for all the subsequent Germanic languages. We know this because the subsequent Germanic languages are littered with grammatical structures that look like the perfect but don't actually carry the differentiation of level completeness that perfect and imperfect have demonstrated and still do demonstrate in other languages. And since there has been no re-emergence of that function in any of the languages, it's quite proper to say that the form is vestigial and that Germanic languages lost their perfective aspect at that time. Even though it was long ago.

more later, I've got shit to do

>>2061228
> The notion that everything should be compared with Latin (or if not Latin, then to some other "mother" language) is out-of-date, was never actually based on any linguistic theory, and isn't considered a legitimate method by any modern linguist. Such comparisons aren't worth much because they use bad frames of reference (i.e. a completely different language).

I do not promote the use of Latin as a basis for categorizing every feature of a language. I have mentioned Latin previously for two reasons. 1. It actually has a genuine perfect and imperfect aspect system. (Okay a third reason 1.5, I actually have some experience with it unlike Spanish or Greek. If I knew Spanish I'd not have brought it up as an example.) 2. Because the reason that anyone even talks about an English or a German perfect is because the comprehensive grammars of English and German were constructed by the very old school and out of date linguists who saw the structure and insisted on calling it the perfect despite the fact that it no longer serves an aspectual purpose. Now this doesn't create confusion among people who know what perfect originally meant, but to the bunch of HS writingfags who are on here, their grammar teacher's words are God-breathed. And they assume that because it has a name it has a function. It doesn't. "I ate" and "I have eaten" is the same. In a language that has perfect and imperfect aspect, it does mean something.

yesterday
>first day in the creative writing class
>half of the students only read sci-fi
>some guy pretends he wrote "a few" sci-fi nnovels that he wants to publish (he's 19yo)
>whythishappenstome.jpg

>>2061228
The link to wikipedia is just such an example. It shows how the form of the English perfect is formed. What it doesn't comp to is the fact that English doesn't really have a perfect, and we might as well be calling it the past composite (as in French), or conversational past (in German) as often is done by language educators who wish to avoid confusing their students into thinking that the aspect is functioning. Upthread I linked and a wikipedia article written by someone who understands the situation better and says "English has neither a simple perfective or imperfective aspect; see imperfective and perfective for some basic English equivalents of this distinction."

>>2063459
I suspect that they only defended me because the other guys somehow offended them through talking bullshit to me.
Initially, it was just one guy hating me, and another telling him to shut up, but then both sides gained supporters.

>>2063501
You don't have to associate yourself with them.
Seriously, who cares if someone likes books you don't. As long as they get a kick out of it, good for them.
Just write your stuff, receive critique, improve your writing, rinse and repeat.

>>2063464
No murder mysteries?
Strange shit you got yourself in.

Well, be different, write a cheesy story about love and friendship, give it intentionally bad lines, and make sure it takes itself extremely seriously. Or don't.

>>2063501
good for them, sci-fi is the only thing worth writing. Provided they aren't filthy communists writing about how magically all the races will work together and blacks will stop being unevolved proto-humans.

>Be 15
>Huge years long crush on girl in class
>Channel repressed horny-ness into creative writing piece from the POV of a vampire sizing up his next victim
>Teacher reads it and is absolutely disgusted, gives it full marks anyway because its beautifully written.

Who's the man? I'm the man.

>>2063480
>>2063499
>>2063509
> It shows how the form of the English perfect is formed. What it doesn't comp to is the fact that English doesn't really have a perfect,
>it shows how the English perfect is formed
>English doesn't really have a perfect
>how the perfect is formed
>doesn't have a perfect

What all of your butthurt and rage boils down to is just that you disagree with the majority of educated linguists on this facet of English grammar. You seem oblivious to the fact that although there may be different names for it across different disciplines (pluperfect, past perfect, retrospective), there is absolutely no debate as to whether or not it exists.

Wow, /co/ was right. You really are all pretentious fucks who spend your time arguing about pointless shit that no-one else cares about.

>>2065205
Someone already said that, smartass.

>>2065205
Don't get so existensial on us

>>2065216
Nigga whaaa?

>>2065211
Why is Osaka killing Chiyo?

Wrote this retarded gross-out story about pissing and throwing up and shit but it was brilliantly crafted so I got a B+

:( This thread is going to max out before I start mine.

>>2065232
Why does Osaka do anything Osaka does?

>>2065242
Well there's that rivalry with Tokyo...

>>2065242
Well, I'd say it's becuase Osaka is retarded, but that doesn't change the fact that she isn't a particularly violent person. So it is mysterious

>>2065284
She snapped.

>>2065292
But she's not insane. She's just stupid.

You guys do know that the grades you get in creative writing class are entirely dependent on your ability to revise you work, and the quality of writing has absolutely no effect on your grade.....right????? Tell me you were aware of this because I feel like I'm the only one who's in on it.

>>2065307
>to revise you work
F-
See me after class.

To be honest I think it would be more believable if Sakaki were the one who snapped. She's always so quiet She could legitimately be insane

>>2065307
>>2065308

Oh also, there's often a grade for participation in the workshops, and occasionally essays on certain topics. I mean, just, if you think you're proud of your B+ because your story was so damn good, you should really be ashamed for not getting the easiest A that your college offered because you didn't do some basic shit like revise it well enough or speak enough in a workshop.

>>2065313
And what happens when you are a conservative and don't want to write leftist drivel so your teacher gives you a lower mark? Politics is the driving motivation at higher education. At least in the whole lib arts stuff.

>>2065320
Are you saying that you want to turn in some sort of political commentary to a creative writing class? I don't even know what your complaint is here. That's not acceptable material no matter what your political views are.

>>2053984
>I went from 87 to 67 because, wait for it, the themes it dealt with were, and I quote, 'too mature.'
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. That is just bullshit.

>be an english major
>haven't taken any writing classes except for technical writing
Though judging from my fellows they'll probably turn up stories half serious and about sex

>>2065152
There is no debate. It is called perfect, but doesn't function as perfect. Kind of like your mom says you're good but you really suck.

>>2065364
>>2065364
>>2065364
>>2065364
>>2065364
>>2065364

Now you're just back-tracking. You do realize that terminology for English grammar is a mess, and so are the terminologies for other languages' grammars, right? Or maybe you don't. At the very least you seem to have read the Wikipedia article by now and are just bickering about the semantics of what it's called.

And all of this to justify your shitty writing style where everything is written in "pluperfect" because you thought it was "so epic," to quote your words.

>>2054011
People in writing classes are interested in the quality of their writing, and not just writing 50,000 words of shit so they can say they did.

>>2065400
Wait, is that what Nanowrimo actually is? Yeah, I wouldn't have called that faggot either.

>>2063499

>"I ate" and "I have eaten" is the same.

No they're not.

Another example:

"I worked in the shop"

"I have worked in the shop"

Don't have the same meaning at all, or do they? No. No they don't.

>>2065411
it's the same thing you pretentious faggot.

>>2065501
Your reply makes me facepalm for our children and for our children's children and for their children after them.

>>2065411
What is the difference in meaning then, faggot? And don't say "they feel different". All the different dicks in your ass feel different, but they're all still a dick in your ass.

>>2065388
That's not backtracking. That was the central thrust of my argument you turd licking moron. The grammar terms are a mess and the would be artistes here who think they can write claim that there are semantic differences between different forms that no longer have differentiated functions because a) what they learned from some cunt in 6th grade English must be true, so if she said it's perfect then perfect it must be and b) they are unfamiliar with foreign languages or the history of their language and thus lack any sense of perspective when thinking about the formulations that they use.

>>2065388
And pluperfect actually does have a function. It is used in collocation of time.

So you fail.

>>2065504
>implying your seed will be anything but spilt

>200-level Fiction workshop as a freshman
>I'm the only guy in the class
>it's cool, no big deal
>most of the stories are about sororities or "this is what I did on vacation" bullshit
>I write a story about a filthy 300lb cook who has a bitchy girlfriend and likes motorcycles (lol I dunno)
>in the story, there is a fifth of whiskey in the cook's bedroom
>they don't like it because the guy is a slob and the girl is mean and therefore unrealistic
>one girl doesn't know what a fifth of whiskey is
>later in the semester we submit some work to one of our campus's lit journals
>I am the only one published
>lol

Not even mad.

Archive this fucking thread, says the Newfag.

>Summer writing camp
>Everybody writes the most dramatic shit
>I write silly comedy, shit I would frown at today
>but fuck it, I was like 14, who cares if the stuff I wrote was crap?
>Meet actual author
>Ask her "So how much effort do you spend on planning/designing/creating your characters?"
>She responds "Oh, I don´t really bother with that, I just make up a name and write whatever comes to mind".
>This fucknut is published
>Published
>mfw

>>2066332
I have a kind of similar experience

>author visiting
>speaker introduces her as publishing something like 60+ books or something ridiculous like that
>audience "ooohs" and claps
>author is bigger than Gabe Newell
>she reads an excerpt from one of her books and it's just some girl being raped and enjoying it
>realize that all 60+ of her published books are paint-by-number Harlequin romances
>audience cheers like she's a rock star when she's done reading

>mfw I'm in AP Language and Composition as a JR in HS.

>>2066142
That a male was published is no surprise. Typical female writer oppression. You should feel ashamed.

>>2066445

Umm, you do realize that those two classes are totally unrelated to creative writing courses, and if taken in high school are community college-level bad, and totally unlike anything you would ever experience in a college setting?

>>2066477
You jelly I don't have to take a writing class with AP credits?

You jelly I'm gonna take an English class anyway?

>>2066477
Real college creative writing courses: the elite vanguard of writing terrible shit that will never get published.

>>2066453
dohohoho

lolfeminism

>>2066486
I was just pointing out that your post is wholly unrelated to the content of the thread. Also, great for you, I'm sorry you will never realize that english classes can actually be good when they are not intro level. But seeing as you sound like you are not going into liberal arts I doubt that matters to you.

>>2066487
Creative Writing courses suck and are totally unrelated to actual Composition classes, I was saying that the kid should experience real lit classes instead of high school english teachers who suck.

>>2065501
>>2066104
>>2066110
>>2066113
>>2066120

I ate. = Food was consumed at some point in time by me.

I have eaten. = Food was consumed at some point in time by me, and it's relevant to this point in time. I.e., somebody just asked me if I'm hungry, and I want to explain in three words why I'm not hungry.

"Are you hungry?"
"I ate."
"Was that this morning, or recently? Are you still hungry?"
"I ate recently."

vs.

"Are you hungry?"
"I have eaten."
"I fully understand you without any ambiguity."

>>2067287
No. You have it backwards.

I have eaten. = Food was consumed at some point in time by me.

I ate. = Food was consumed at some point in time by me, and it's relevant to this point in time. I.e., somebody just asked me if I'm hungry, and I want to explain in two words why I'm not hungry.

"Are you hungry?"
"I have eaten."
"Was that this morning, or recently? Are you still hungry?"
"I have eaten recently."

vs.

"Are you hungry?"
"I ate."
"I fully understand you without any ambiguity."

>>2067296
>you

>>2067287
>>2067296
Neither of these are credible. A difference in meaning has not been demonstration.

>>2067296
Best be trollin'.

>>2067361
It's trolling but it is trolling in response to bullshit. This "I ate" is no more ambiguous than "I have eaten".

>>2068814

Oh wow. You really are that stupid.

>>2068977
Wait, you actually believe your claim is valid? How? In both examples the answer implies the person ate recently based on context. You've demonstrated nothing about the different structures conveying meaning in the specific case, let alone in a general form. If you think that's an argument, you're even more stupid than you think I am.

>>2069099
>based on context.

You're starting to get it. "I ate" requires context to be interpreted as "I am not hungry because I ate." But "I have eaten" does not require it.

Is English not your first language or something, pumpkin?

>>2069139
Why does "I have eaten" not work within the context? You claim it doesn't but you don't demonstrate it at all.

Can you link to anything that supports your claim that there is a meaninful difference between "I ate" and "I have eaten"? Your post above was not argumentation, it was merely assertion. Furthermore, you'd need a generally applicable difference of meaning, not a specific case to justify your argument.

>>2069139
Both formulations rely on context.
Can you link to anything that supports your claim that there is a meaninful difference between "I ate" and "I have eaten"? Your post above was not argumentation, it was merely assertion. Furthermore, you'd need a generally applicable difference of meaning, not a specific case to justify your argument.

>>2069180
>>I ate
>>I have eaten
>>Your cock
>>A cock which is yours.

Good enough?

>>2069189
You sucked many cocks.
You have sucked many cocks.

They both sound right to me.

>just started a creative writing class
>first half will be poetry
>I just had to peer-review a poem about trees as a metaphor for friends

actually one of the poems was really fucking good, I'm kind of jealous.

>CW course
>Third (of four) assignment is "Lovecraftian".
>I write a story in which a Terrible race flies through space, conquering planets and stripping them of natural resources.
>SHOCKING TWIST in that this race is humanity.
>Get an A because "Excellent metaphor for over-dependence on oil".
>whatisthisidon'teven

>>2069180
Read any credible book on English grammar. Seriously. Even Wikipedia says the same thing.

You've basically taken an impossible stance and haven't really taken the time to understand what you're saying.

>>2069180
>http://books.google.com/books?id=qFpkAIAOeg8C&lpg=PP2&dq=english%20grammar%20tenses&
pg=PA244#v=onepage&q&f=false

>>2069193

Alright, genius. If they're the same, then explain this: why is it that when asking about experience, we always use the perfect aspect?

I want to know how many years of experience you have with the English language, so I ask you: "How many years have you spoken English?"

Can I say "How many years did you speak English?" and convey the same meaning? Does this sound in any way natural? What about "How many years do you speak English?" Do these sentences have the same meaning or naturalness?

Starting to get it, fag?

>>2069296

Nice book. Check out what section 1.26.1 says.

>>2069425
Oh yeah. And the next section.

There is form, but not aspect. Which is what I said long ago.

>>2069352
>Alright, genius. If they're the same, then explain this: why is it that when asking about experience, we always use the perfect aspect?

We do not. For example "Did you ever learn what aspect means?" There's no perfect aspect in that form.

But scaling back from the always, yes it is the most frequent construction used when talking about the past.
But it is not to the exclusion of other possibilities.
"In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes?"- Blake

>>2069278
Look at the wikipedia talk pages, and I swear this isn't my handiwork. What you'll find is that the pages that most adamantly insist on English having perfect aspect / perfective aspect are the ones without citation, and where there is a great amount of conflict/confusion with other users. That is because we have a lot of people who wax poetic about that feature of the language without realizing that English doesn't have perfect aspect.

>>2069425
>Apart from the aspects referred to above, some linguistic works also speak of 'perfect aspect' in English. This term is introduced to capture the observation that when one of the English perfect tenses is used, the situation referred to is often viewed from a particular perspective, namely from the perspective of the time when a result yielded by, or the relevance of, an anterior situation expressed by the perfect form is perceptible.

What's not to understand? Did you think I wouldn't read it or something? This section correctly summarizes the perfect aspect in English and completely refutes your nonsensical argument about it not existing. Case closed.

>>2069427
>>2069433
>>2069436

Do you think that replying 4-5 times at once makes it look like there's anybody but one lone idiot arguing with me?

Anyway, with this post, the thread has reached its bump limit. You have been proven wrong for the last time, and I am satisfied that the people in my past creative writing classes who experimented with weird tenses were truly clueless as to what they were doing.

Good night.

>>2069446
Final paragraph of 1.26.1, bitch.

Our conversation has splintered into many subthreads because your bloviations are too longwinded to be able to quote and still have enough characters left to address them.

>>2069473
Can't tell if stupid, or just stupid.