It's actually funny that you should raise that one, because it's generally agreed upon in the writing community to not be very good advice. I hesitate to call it terrible, but the modern advice in general is to use "said" and avoid too many alternates, as they call attention to the word itself over the dialogue, and frequently add nothing that you cannot achieve through story beats or dialogue style.This is, I think, where I want to tread a bit more delicately. Let's be upfront that I never insinuated that using longer or shorter sentences said anything about the quality of writing: introducing that argument feels like a strawman. Advising on the purpose and effect a long sentence has on a reader does not necessarily mean using them or not means it is emblematic of bad writing. In fact, most writers will use both long and short sentences, because they achieve different effects. Like, grab a book, any book, so long as it has an action scene. Compare the action scene to another one, and then particularly the length of sentences for action segments.

You'll note they almost always use shorter sentences than otherwise.

Do you not suppose there's a reason for that?

For the rest of your post, it kind of feels like you're not really directing it at me. My argument has never been to shove writing feedback down everyone's throats, so I don't get why you're so up in arms over that. I understand you feel writing is subjective and it'd be way too difficult to provide feedback, but there is a profession that deals with it entirely, and I wouldn't feel comfortable putting editors down as a bunch of people who do nothing but have opinions about writing.

lovelorn
I do not want to put you on the spot or anything, and I'm glad you came out to answer my question on why we afford so little attention for the writing itself! But I'm curious: what experiences have you had that make it difficult (I assume that's what you meant) to give feedback on writing itself?

There's writing clubs, editors, agents, and other professions/communities where it's rather normal and expected to give advice on writing, so I'd love to get some insight why it's kind of...taboo? in the roleplaying world. One of my fondest recent roleplaying experiences was on Patisserie, where one of my roleplay partners took the time to message me with some feedback on my writing, and I kinda feel we should normalise letting others know what we like about their writing. And we should normalise asking others how we can make our writing more interesting.

Or even just have threads dedicated to generic writing advice, like when to use long sentences, what's the function of the first line, how to use beats, or whyever should we tell rather than show.

I've always thought it kind of weird that we have a lot of resources for finding PFPs, code snippets, layout help, et cetera et cetera, but virtually no resources whatsoever to help people on the road to writing. We also discuss layouts and skins and get feedback on all sorts of things...but not the writing itself.

Why is that


As for "focused on writing", there's Tumblr blogs (I know) that encourage developing the craft, but also subreddits. You could take a gander at those, perhaps?

I mean, it's one thing to age-gate one's site to 18+, and maybe raise the bar a little higher for personal comfort reasons, but I swear that sometimes, the hobby of forum RPing seems to have become like that Twitter meme about how "I think kids should be banned from the Internet altogether, because the fact that I'm at risk from hearing a 14-year old's opinion on something is a violation of my human rights."