User blog comment:Banned In CP/Common Flaws in CP Writing/@comment-28266772-20180208170749

I'd say the most common mechanical problem is, like you mention, sentence structure. What annoys me the most is I find native speakers of English are actually the most careless for these kinds of problems. After that I'd say tenses are another major sticking point that people frequently mess up on.

Stylistically I'd say people just do not put effort into building atmosphere or mood. They just dryly explain what is happening and do not use descriptive language to create a feeling in the reader.

And in terms of plot I'd say a huge problem is a lack of rational connecting tissue. It's so hard to describe why Lovecraft's rule of "never explain anything" makes sense for some plot points, but not others. So not explaining where a monster comes from can be great. If you just watch Alien as a standalone film and ignore all that Prometheus nonsense it just makes you feel like the universe is a hostile place where it's easy to just lift up a rock and get eaten by some long-forgotten monstrosity.

But what I often see are stories that go something like this, "Bill is a young man who walks into a shed to get a rake when a giant skinless man bursts through the floor and starts to eat his feet but Bill fights back and hits the skinless man with a rake. Bill then drags himself back to his house and begs his wife to help him but when he opens the door she too no longer has skin and she begins to laugh while telling him that his soul belongs to Satan".

Being weird and being inane are subtely different things and all too often people just write about an inane series of events. What makes it frustrating is all I can say is "this doesn't really make sense" which feels like poor feedback because it's not exactly like Abandoned by Disney makes a lot of sense either. It's just that it establishes its series of events in a way that makes some kind of sense to the reader.