Let's hear from the Writing Community - 2021

Question

It's been over a year since our last community check in and a bit has happened since then. Mainly, we had our first proper (non pro-tem) election taking us one step closer to a fully graduated site. Good things are happening for this community and the mod team feel it is valuable to get the community's input on what you would like to see happen here.

Answers to this post can be constructive ideas, recommendations for changes of policy or just general thoughts on how the site is going and what you would like to see going forward.

How this Q&A works

To get the most value out of this post and ensure there is space for everyone to be heard, I'm going to ask that answers follow a few simple rules.

One clear premise per answer

1. Post some of the things the community has done/observations you've made/things you think still need improvement. Make sure and note whether you think the thing is an improvement, a problem, or some mix of the two (one person might see the same change as bad that you see as good, or vice versa)...

2. Post one kind of thing per answer, so that when people upvote/downvote based on whether they agree or not it's more clearly actionable - if you write an essay about 4 different things, it's not going to be clear what part(s) people agree or disagree with and thus it becomes unactionable. You can of course contribute multiple answers.

3. Upvote or downvote the answers based on your agreement with whether you see that thing happening and concur with the answer's premise that it's good or it's a problem. (In other words, if someone says "We get too many new users and I hate them," you would upvote if you agree, and downvote if either you don't think we get too many new users or if you don't hate them.)

No long comment threads

1. If you disagree with an answer, post your own answer, don't argue in comments. If you post more than one comment on an answer, you should consider if that is useful at all. We're interested in overall community sentiment as shown by votes, not so much that one person is so irritated they post 10 comments.

2. This isn't the place to workshop solutions - if a problem gets a lot of votes, we should open a new meta question to do justice to that issue. Solutions hidden in a comment thread on one of these questions are unable to be clearly vetted and voted on so they will tend to go undone.

As usual, Be Nice applies to meta as well as the main site.

You may strongly disagree with other users or with the mods or whoever, but we trust you can find ways to express what you like or don't like without being hostile or insulting to others. Focus on actions rather than characterizing people.

So please contribute your ideas, thought and feedback so that we can improve our community together!

Answer 1

Where do we stand on questions about English?

(I say English because that's what I've always seen, but they could be any language. Also, yes we've discussed similar before but many of the discussions are ancient. Also mentioned in last year's answers in passing.)

Right now, there are a number of new questions asking "what's the word?" which have 1-2 close votes each. Then there's two or so of "what punctuation?" also with a few close votes each. But many of these questions have answers, and some are even upvoted.

Any one of these questions, since they are so narrowly scoped, would be on topic at ELU or ELL (though it's a coin flip if they'd be closed at ELU anyway). I'll note that we already have an established overlap with these sites, such as:

• Style guide questions
• Questions asking for terms about writing (What's our stance on terminology questions?)

My thoughts: the categories above are relevant here. Punctuation questions are usually questions of style, so it makes sense to have them here. And questions about looking for words, at least those unrelated to writing, don't neatly fall into either of those categories, and feel closer in spirit to historical questions: they're off topic since they're better answered by some other expert (even if you do need the answer for your writing).

And long form English questions (for a lack of a better term), such as those asking how to reduce pronoun redundancy in writing, are on topic. I don't believe these questions fit on any other site.