Reasons stories are rejected from the archive

When I first joined the moderation team, another mod said to me, "People cannot punctuate dialogue." Sadly, this is true, as borne out by the statistics below, with dialogue punctuation issues primarily falling into one or both of the following categories:

• Issues with punctuating or lowercasing speech tags that follow dialogue, e.g. "This is a sentence." The Doctor said.
• Issues with punctuating action tags – tags including verbs that typically describe a physical action, and which always form complete sentences of their own – the same way as speech tags, e.g., "This is a sentence," the Doctor smiled.

Miscellaneous grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors are the next largest reason for rejection: mixes of past and present tense, it's/its and your/you're confusion, and so on. We also have some formatting requirements, such as limiting summaries to a single paragraph, and making sure that each paragraph in a story, including lines of dialogue spoken by different characters, is separated by a blank line to improve readability.

When we send rejection notes, we frequently include links to websites with examples of how to do it correctly; we don't want to leave authors without any sense of what's actually gone wrong. If authors seem to be having particular trouble, we'll sometimes take the time to send back an entire chapter marked-up with the issues we found and fixes we recommend. We are a very small team and can't do this all the time, but it's important to us that we try to point people in the right direction.

Finally, we can reject for content, but only do so on rare occasions, primarily because someone has submitted a few words or a single sentence that doesn't yet constitute a story with a narrative thread, or because the story features actors or members of the show's production team ("RPF," or "real person fiction"). We never reject because we personally don't like a story. Only our Submission Guidelines and Terms of Service apply.