This week: Alpha vs Beta Edited by: Lilli 🧿 ☕  
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 There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
~ Ernest Hemingway
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.
~ Socrates
I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.
~ Steven Wright
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As writers and readers, we may often see an author asking for Alpha or Beta readers, so we must understand the differences between the two.
A comes before B, right? Well, alpha readers see a manuscript before a beta reader does. With the draft and self-editing done, an author may want to show their work to a trusted fellow writer for general feedback. Therefore, an alpha reader is the first person to see our work.
The purpose of the alpha reader is to approach the work as a writer-reader; someone to help find the holes and disjointed areas of a story. While they can point out obvious typos, they should not be looking at sentence structure or commas—they should look at the overall story. For example, they will look for what’s working and what feels weak. What makes sense in our head doesn’t always translate to the page. An alpha reader will help locate the major points and how to strengthen them, and the weak points that may not need to be there at all.
A beta reader must also look at ‘the big picture’, but their approach to a story is as a more casual reader. We’ll want to look for people to read our work as an average reader, not someone to analyze the story. A beta reader should give us feedback; both positive and negative. We need to remember that their constructive criticism is a crucial part of the creative writing process, so we need to thicken up our skin a bit. Something we may need to ask ourselves is whether we are writing for ourselves or for others to enjoy.
Believe it or not, every prominent writer has had help. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound shared their writing with one another. Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein read each other’s work. Alpha and beta readers are not a new concept. We need people who don’t live in the story to experience it fresh and tell us what they see on the page. It’s the only way to know if what you’re trying to achieve is actually working.
Alpha and beta readers are the ones to run ideas by and discuss problem areas. They’re the ones who are going to be honest and tell us what they see so we can match it up with what we want readers to see and experience. |
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Comment received from my Drama Newsletter; "'Tis the season..." :
oldgreywolf on wheels  wrote:
June brides mean spring babies.
(1) The mother would recover in time for the fall harvest;
(2) apparently, babies born in the spring or early summer are healthier, due to all the pollen they inhale for their body to deal with. I read about 15-20 years ago that this has been statistically confirmed, but a single study is just so much paperwork until an independent researcher studies the issue, too.
(3) in some primitive, agriculturally poor societies, they may still wait a year, to see if the baby lives to their birth anniversary. If it does, then that's the baby's naming day.
Comment received from my Drama Newsletter: "Chaos and Confusion" :
Quick-Quill  wrote:
Thank you for the clarification. I still have to think about how I’m using further and farther. Also using effect and affect, is a stop and think which I’m using. |
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Drama: July 12, 2023 Issue [#12065]
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