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I am wondering if I can post a short excerpt of my writing and ask people to comment on the inconsistency of the tone in various parts of the writing?

Similarly, can I post a short excerpt of my writing and ask people how they think of specific sentences?

3 Answers 3

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We don't do critiques

Posting an exert of your writing and asking for feedback or help fixing it will be closed as off topic. We also don't do requests for rephrasing or problem solving specific sentences.

We help solve writer's problems

What we can do however, is provide advise on maintaining a consistent tone in your writing. Our close reason for writing critiques says:

While questions that use your writing to illustrate a point in the question are fine, requests for writing critiques are off-topic here. For more information, see Does Writing.SE accept critique requests?

If you read the meta linked there you will see the difference between a critique question and using your writing as an example of your problem.

Following that advice you could ask a question like this:

How can I improve the consistency of my tone?

I have a common issue that effects all of my writing. The tone of my narration is inconsistent within a given work. For example I wrote:

[Example of your writing here]

I have tried [X, Y, Z...] to resolve it but it still happens. How can I improve the consistency of my tone?

Answers will focus on technique you can use to improve your writing, instead of trying to re-write the passage for your with a more consistent tone.

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Sorry no. While asking about how to create a particular tone is on topic, what you're asking for here is a critique of your writing. This isn't something we do on Writing.SE and it's been that way for many many years. (Seriously, we'd be overrun.)

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  • Sorry I have to downvote this. Not because you are incorrect, but because it doesn't help the OP. While it's true we don't do critique we can point them in the right direction to ask a question that would be on topic.
    – linksassin Mod
    Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 3:35
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    @linksassin Downvoting on Meta isn't the same as downvoting on the main stack. There are no rep points and it doesn't mean you think it's a poor answer. It's about agreeing with it. So no worries. That being said, I did point the OP in the right direction. I said that asking about how to create a particular tone would be fine. Also, please note that this question on Meta is so popular, it has its own tag. The OP asked a yes or no question, I gave the type of answer s/he asked for, even if s/he would have preferred a yes to a no.
    – Cyn
    Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 3:52
  • I knew you would understand. The comment was more for others benefits. I didn't want anyone thinking your answer was incorrect. "How to create a particular tone" wasn't really the same question so it read to me like OP couldn't ask their question here. Since they are a new user (to our site) I wanted to make it clearer what version of their question would be allowed.
    – linksassin Mod
    Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 6:18
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I see everyone else have already answered your question, so my answer will only add on the info they've provided. Excerpts are only to be used as examples, or for context. Now, if you believe there is a problem with your tonal consistency, you could include an excerpt of an are you think is reflective of this. But then, you'd have to be specific in how you think that certain excerpt is tonally inconsistent. In this case, the excerpt would be an example of the tonal inconsistency that you're worried about. But if you simple post the excerpt and ask, "is this in-line with the tone I'm going for", then you are in critique area.

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