Beta request

[alias_sqbr]

EDIT: Wait a tic, I just realised there's a bunch of things I want to mess with.

Would anyone be willing to look over this story for me? It's a 3000 word Avatar The Last Airbender story about Toph and Teo(*) developing a Braille-like writing system(**).

What I'd like having checked is any of, in order of likelihood that any of you can help:

• General spelling, flow etc.
  
• Avatar:TLA canon compliance
  
• The mechanics of Braille, printing presses, and Mandarin and if at all possible their interaction (hey, there might be a history major who knows Chinese Braille reading this, you never know!)
  

If not: where does one find betas for this sort of thing? I think I may be doomed with the "Is this a reasonable alternate development of Chinese Braille?" question.

This is my third attempt at drawing Toph fanart. I got a lot closer this time, I only fell down when I started thinking about the back story to the sketch I was drawing.

(*)The Avatar one, not the A Circle of Stars one. Though that would be funny :)
(**)I think the thing that got me into writing fanfic was realising that while for most other people "self indulgent wish fulfillment" means wingfic mpreg porn or whatever, for me it's having my characters introducing democracy or access ramps to fantasy settings. Hey, don't judge my kinks and I won't judge yours.

Comments

[triestine.livejournal.com]

Ooooh FIC! *goes*

[alias_sqbr]

Since posting it I've gone rather rapidly from "This is pretty good and finished" to "THIS IS THE WORST FIC EVER AND EVERYTHING IS WRONG AND I NEED TO REWRITE IT ALL OR MAYBE BURN IT AND NEVER WRITE AGAIN". But um..I hope you like it anyway :)

This time I hope not to hit 'post' before I'm done.

[triestine.livejournal.com]

Relax! :D I bookmarked it, had lunch, and am now set to enjoy myself with fic and a cup of tea. I peeked at the notes and I already like your priorities.

:)

[triestine.livejournal.com]

That was lovely! WRT betaing, I spotted several misplaced apostrophes, but that's about as 'bad' as it gets. Toph is pretty much my favourite Avatar character and I love that you kept her intellect and self-assurance bang on. Finally, as a fellow printmaker I am thrilled to see presses at the centre of a story. Thank you!

Re: :)

[alias_sqbr]

Yaaay! It makes me happy to know someone doesn't hate it, and happier to know you liked it ^_^ I'm still pretty new to writing fic so have no reliable internal measure of how good a story is.

I have been slowly going through a "history of information" podcast which (a)impressed upon me the importance of presses and (b)taught me that the Koreans invented movable type, but that they used it for bureaucracy. It's been sitting in the back of my brain for like a year and a half being all half-baked plot-bunnyish.

Yesterday I came across another fic which emphasised how annoying stairs are when you have mobility problems and I was all "Yay! I am not the only person who sees this as an important topic for fic!" :)

[nico-wolfwood.livejournal.com]

Damn, I'd agree but I don't know the continuity. Sorry!

[alias_sqbr]

Well, here's a question: how long do you think it would take someone who could speak Mandarin fluently but was totally illiterate to learn to read it? What about to get a basic feel the characters enough to copy a page of text legibly? All the information I can find assumes the student doesn't speak Mandarin.

I realise I would have no idea how to answer this question for English, but it's worth a shot.

And clearly you need to finish watching the show for my sake :D

[nico-wolfwood.livejournal.com]

In my experience, Mandarin is pretty structured in the way it’s written – a basic number of strokes put together make simple characters, which can be put together to make more complex characters. I don’t think copying a page of text legibly would be very hard with some practice, although they would probably have no idea of the meaning of what they were writing. Mind you, it wouldn't be calligraphy and this only goes for my personal experience of the current simplified Chinese characters. It would depend on exactly what writing implements were used and what they were trying to copy. For example: characters written simply with a pencil or brush and copied with pencil would be fairly easy; characters written simply with a pencil or brush and copied with a brush would be harder (and possibly not legible); characters written with a brush in a calligraphy type style would be impossible to copy unless you knew what you were doing i.e. had training. (Maybe impossible is too strong a word, but I certainly wouldn’t place bets on it unless the person doing the copying approached it as an artist copying a piece of artwork and then it might be possible if they were a good artistic forger.)

As to your question about learning to read and write a language that they were already verbally fluent in, I would have no personal experience. It would probably be similar to the ‘learning to write in their native language’ process that children go through, except that I’ve read that current teaching methods may not be teaching that efficiently.

‘A similar honing process is thought to occur when young children begin to link letter shapes and their associated sounds. Cells in the visual cortex wired to recognize shapes specialize in recognizing letters; these cells communicate with neurons in the auditory cortex as the letters are associated with sounds.

The process may take longer to develop than many assume. A study published in March by neuroscientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands suggested that the brain does not fully fuse letters and sounds until about age 11.’ -- Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them by Benedict Carey

[alias_sqbr]

She's making metal stamps for printing, so the complications of calligraphy don't come up, thankfully.

And yes, I have trouble imagining learning to read totally fluent and grown up. I might ask at little_details (they might know about Braille too)