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Sure, the point system encourages the same sincerity of paid reviews of books sold on Amazon or of merchandise sold anywhere over the internet. If the point system exists to encourage reviews, and I am sure it does, why is there otherwise not a genuine review process, on style and substance, and not so much on grammar and punctuation, only for the sake of reviewing, among disinterested strangers who have nothing to get or give, on TNBW?  It ought to be simple: find a book that has something which interests you and comment on it to the extent it satisfies or disappoints, and why.  But no, everyone either wants to suck up and "make friends"  or get reciprocal reviews of the junk they write for the junk they read.

I was unaware that spelling and grammar criticisms are appropriate in chat forums. 

What do you think it means if I did not add two words for better construction? If you genuinely have no idea, then my adding those two words won't help you.

Okay, now the status has gone from not working perfectly to not working at all.  The text imported is not at all Word embedded text (with errors) but plain ASCII.

Okay, I think I have narrowed it down to a faulty increase font size in the final TNBW published display.  If I increase the font to a huge 20 before, in the editor before publishing, the final text is readable to me, but the increase in sized font in the displayer still produces faulty results, and the blockquote doesn't work. The huge default font might look strange on someone else's display and can't be reduced for them.

This is what I emailed:

subject: any cut/paste into  <> TNBW editor
PC WIN7 IE8 and Chrome > new paragraph after italicized words and faulty blockquote

When you incorrectly conflated my comments into "OMG" = "Go f***" yourself" you obliterated my obliquely expressed opinion that there is a right and proper use of substitute words for obscenities in circumstances such as, for example, a father who says "Gosh, son, you are being bad right now, go to your room" versus "Go f*** yourself, get out of my sight"  using hyperbole here for both examples. Furthermore, the counterpoint to your suggestion that "taking the Lord's name in vain," for which Gosh, Cripes, Jesus H. Christ, Gee, Golly are used as substitutes, is preferable is not so much that you are wrong, but that you insult those, or their particular religious expression, who think otherwise. It is an interesting fact of history that during the English Commonwealth era, the Puritans thought to ban all substitutes, in public and private, as well, and I think on both sides those complaining about the words we use either as wishy-washy or offensive are busybodies -- unless the words themselves are not words like OMG about which you did not express any demur.

. . .were deleted" by the original poster(s), okay, then all that follow in response to those original posts get deleted, too, I guess.

The downside to that process of review, however, is in the inability of the reviewer to clarify a misapprehension of the writer on a point made in the review. There is no reply to a reply.  I can see that the review process ought not to be a debating forum, but, for example, if you genuinely misunderstood that I never equated an innocuous OMG with a more serious "Go f*** yourself" in my review of your latest submission to this group, I think you completely missed the point I made about the entire process of euphemism which I believe should not be socially denigrated as something "not modern," or whatever it was that was your complaint, nor those remaining behind in the unsophisticated fly-over country still inclined to use euphemism, for whatever purpose,  I went on to point out, ought to be be insulted or put down as silly but rather encouraged in many circumstances as all in which the F-word is used. The thing about such a reply to a reply is that it is not exactly a "review" but it is a calling to attention to a writer that which he or she may not have realized as evidenced by the very misapprehension for which the reply to a reply was intended to clarify.

http://www.thenextbigwriter.com/posting … test-19810

test
Lady Rowena:
Rebecca:

italicized in Word and cut/paste into the TNBW editor; but save or published comes with an added carriage return and sometimes font change

As to Steinbeck, is his book continued to be pushed within academia for students because of all of the good writing or because it is left-wing political propaganda? Perhaps, as to historicity and his writing being relevant to American literature, I understand, as Hawthorne, Melville, etc., but what about contemporary writers such as Burke, mentioned earlier (when there is no political propaganda in a subtle way that one might say even Hawthorne conveyed), or Ayn Rand?  There is parity between Steinbeck and Rand in style except perhaps in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, now three generations in the past, being dystopic "futurism" (and too long), but rather certainly in The Fountainhead and We The Living.  A foreign-born author writing in English?  Joseph Conrad (not even living in the U.S.).  Style: Anti-hero over the hero? Yes. Same question: why are those authors of the anti-hero Great, but rather the author with the style of the hero, in the classic sense especially, Melville, maybe, Heller in an odd sort of way -- and admittedly his writing is ordinary -- not Great?

"If one must write to eat, then one must write to[wards] the masses."   I get that, but if sales are "forced" through institutional buying such as for Steinbeck to instil at least a notion of good writing, why choose Steinbeck? It is a sort of chicken or egg: good writing cannot be encouraged as a matter of taste when the content is such objectionable leftist pablum, and  therefore a contemporaneous choice over Steinbeck would be Micky Spillane, for example, who did write well, but not in high-art style. I might suggest Nevil Shute (On the Beach) in the generation later who did write with a social conscious, just not a leftist one.

It is also that he uses such interesting adjectives and the objects themselves: "open air pavilion among a group of cypress trees"  Similarly, in the opening to his Wayfaring Stranger, "drinking lemonade and peach ice-cream" -- such a detail as PEACH ice-cream!

As to Steinbeck . . . this is somewhat of a different topic about naturalism versus romanticism (or other style that is not naturalism), I am so bored hearing about poor, down-trodden people or descriptions of sad social conditions, etc.  I am also averse to reading in genres such as Burke writes in -- the sort of adventure, mystery-solving sort. I'll admit to preferring  movie/TV versions for that. [I do not have the time and patience for 400+ pp novels any more]  But suppose when an author crosses genre away from mystery/thriller like P.D. James did for Children of Men [dystopian futurism].  Her narrative style is wonderful, and it shone more clearly in C of M than in the one book in her normal mystery genre that I did read which was just okay IMHO.  Moreover, the movie version of C of M was just okay, but the book was excellent because of the narration and the particulars of what James had to say that did not make into the movie.

I believe a rule-of-thumb is the better the novel, the worse the movie version, and I believe most of that, assuming good acting and direction, is due to the cutting of the narrative and the feel the author inputs through his words beyond plot and characters.  However, consider Conrad Aiken's short story, Silent snow, secret snow -- excellent, and there was a TV play version for Rod Serling's Night Gallery that not only kept the narration intact but was performed by Orson Welles. Both a hurried and a melancholic story about a sad little boy falling into mental illness.  It is not "naturalistic" even if dealing with a very real unfortunate human condition. Short, and to the point, even if slowly, tantalizingly revealed.

"Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened the way it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it have occurred to him to ask."

This is great use of words that does not involve the descriptive use of adjectives at all, but rather a complex introduction of a mystery -- that is a mystery to boy and everyone else around him -- to reader in the first words of the story.