HELP! - Posting Better

[Fantasy]

Hey guys! I've noticed that many people, when role playing, don't know how to make very long posts. It's even harder to do this without power playing. So I'm going to teach you a few tricks to make longer, easier to reply to, and better written posts. In this thread, I'm going to use italics to show when I'm "role playing".

Okay. The first trick is to give the other person something to work with. I'd you're starting a thread, it should atleat have two good paragraphs. A good paragraph, in my opinion, has at least three sentences. Hopefully more. The more you give a person to work with, the longer their post is going to be. It's easiest to make a good sized reply to a good sized post.

My next trick is to repeat things. Not to a horrible degree and not word for word, but a little bit of repetitive wording goes a long way. Instead of saying "Linda was horrified after saying the wrong word." , say "Linda was absolutely horrified. How could she say such an astonishing thing? It was absolutely gobsmacking." Do you see how I repeated things without actually saying them again? This works wonders, trust me.

My third trick is to respond to everything. Every moment, every word, every little detail. Even if the thing happened agree beginning of the last post. Even here, if you look around, you'll see people only making their character respond to whatever happened last. It works a lot better when everything gets a reaction. Plus, it help the other person see more of how your character acts.

My fourth tip is to use your adjectives. Instead of saying, "The girl danced." see how much better it sounds when you say "The petite red-headed girl danced blissfully." More words, and it gives you a much better picture in your mind of what is happening. Instead of saying a characters name, describe them. The other person will probably know what you're talking about.

My fifth tip is to use the good ol' figures of speech. I'm going to use the same sentence above and use a few figures of speech on it as an example. Simile "The girl danced like a graceful swan, flying through skies as blue as a sapphire.". Metaphor "The girl was a ballerina, twirling elegantly.". Personification "The girl's limbs flew through the air in beautiful motions.". Lastly, onomatopoeia "Swoosh! The girls hair wrapped around her with light sounds of the air.". Can you see how those were longer and sounded better than the extremely simple sentence we started with? I hope so.

There's an abbreviation for something that resembles never have two sentences begin with the same word. If your post is long enough, you can start them with the same word more often, but only about a sixth should ever begin with the same word. The only exception, in my mind, is using the words the, a, an, or it. Usually, people overuse words like I, he, she, and their characters name. The easy way to avoid this is to use adjectives, like stated above. Instead of using a name, say 'the strong man', 'the startled blonde', 'the petty officer', etc. I also like to reword sentences to make this word. Instead of saying "Carl frowned.", you could say "A frown tilts Carl's lips", "Lips curving downward, Carl *whatever Carl did next*", "The words made Carl's mouth turn upside down. ". Doesn't this look a bit better?

Well, that's all I got. Was this helpful? I hope I can see wveryone make nice, long posts now. I expect only the finest. ^-^ Everyone, good luck!