Habitually Lost

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

Yay

I put together a relatively short survey (about two dozen questions, mostly multiple choice, all optional) to get some data on what fic lengths and completion statuses readers on AO3 prefer or avoid. If I get enough answers to have a good sample size, it should give us some insight into how people search and read on the archive.

If you find this interesting, feel free to share it with AO3 users elsewhere or post it to other platforms. I'd like to get a good crossection of readers that isn't biased by platform, if at all possible.

The survey is just for fun/curiosity, and isn't associated with any university, company, or other entity. It's just me asking you this stuff here :)

I had to learn this shit! I remember being in english class and explicitly being told that the apostrophe is for possessive. And if you’ve got a name like Marcus, then it’s «Marcus’» not «Marcus’s». I’ve made peace with people getting this one wrong, it’s unintuitive, I get it. But the plural peeves me to no end. Do kids not learn this in school? Do you only learn it if you’re in english classes for non-native speakers?

And it’s become so ubiquitous that I just know it’s gonna be accepted as correct in a couple decades/centuries - until the dictionary catches up. Correct language is the language that people use. And I mean, sure, I can understand what they’re trying to say, so it’s not that big of a deal. But I just know it’s gonna become another one of those things that makes english not make any sense, “Why is this a rule in english? Because fuck you that’s why” and you’re gonna need a linguist on tiktok to explain why some plurals have apostrophes and some don’t. It’s not even unintuitive, can they please proofread their fics that they post, if not their comments and dms??

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Marcus' vs. Marcus's is a stylistic choice. Just keep it consistent within a single work.

This other thing is called a greengrocer's apostrophe and it is a plague.

To be fair, when I've looked at the RAE dictionary, it has a lot of "This term is used only in Bolivia" and a lot less "How dare you borrow internet words from English!!!!"

(But I suppose I might as well ask: if you have one single authority, when should I use el voseo: never or always? You can only pick one!)

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Anyway, for my many non-native English speaker friends out there, I wasn't joking about the peasant thing.

Yes, lots of highfalutin European stuff was in Latin until recently, but some European languages were at least a language of power some time before the last five minutes. English kings spent a good few centuries speaking French and not giving a toss about English. Even after the courts and such went back to being in English during the middle ages, we retained a giant inferiority complex towards Latin and French and a lot of standards for English didn't get codified until the last few centuries. The US in particular decided to make up lots of new spellings to prove how not English it was. Now that the US is very, very powerful but obviously not the origin of English, it's impossible to go back to a state where a single authority would be possible.

The result is that our authorities are several, and they're often more descriptive than prescriptive, like the OED or Merriam-Webster, or they're style guides that are telling you how you should write to match their standard but aren't necessarily ruling out other standards existing, like the Chicago Manual of Style.

Spanish is a lot more regular than English, especially in the spelling, and that can make it easier for second language learners, but you can't tell me that a language with multiple versions of the second person has one standard. Does the informal second person plural get its own thing or not? Which version of the informal second person singular is correct?

Who gets to win? Mexico City? Madrid? Probably not Rioplatense.

I'm sorry, but having to deal with 'curb' vs. 'kerb' or different punctuation styles is not more complicated than dealing with a whole ass conjugation that simply doesn't exist in some dialects.

Ppl send topics and instead of salt or hot takes, you MUST talk abt smth you like about it. Good excuse to gush abt smth you already love, OR think and find smth positive to say.