When I read I stray from the text a very slight amount sometimes, along the lines of turning two words into a contraction in dialogue, if that sounds more natural. Or correcting something if it a clear typo.
Anything beyond that, and I won't make a change without explicit author permission. The piece I am working on right now has the word "tortuous" in a place that I was pretty sure the author meant "torturous." I recorded tortuous because that's what the text said, but I felt uneasy about it. Then I realized the author is a friend of mine, and I could just ask her to clarify. She said that yeah, she *had* meant torturous, and then I was comfortable going in and fixing it. But I wouldn't have fixed it if I couldn't ask first, I don't think. I would err on the side of sticking to the text.
If a person were uncomfortable with reading a scene and wanted to go to the author to request a revised version for reading aloud, that would seem reasonable to me, I guess. Although if it's because of content or length, I'd kind of feel like the reader should just choose a different story. The adding dialogue tags thing is a more understandable reason to ask for rewrites, although I would be more impressed with the reader if they just took it as a challenge to really work at making the different speakers in the scene distinguishable.
So I guess my overall verdict is that asking for rewrites is reasonable as a course of action, but it seems even better to choose a story in the first place that you don't need rewrites for, and to take the parts that you're unsure of as challenges, rather than trying to get them changed.
no subject
When I read I stray from the text a very slight amount sometimes, along the lines of turning two words into a contraction in dialogue, if that sounds more natural. Or correcting something if it a clear typo.
Anything beyond that, and I won't make a change without explicit author permission. The piece I am working on right now has the word "tortuous" in a place that I was pretty sure the author meant "torturous." I recorded tortuous because that's what the text said, but I felt uneasy about it. Then I realized the author is a friend of mine, and I could just ask her to clarify. She said that yeah, she *had* meant torturous, and then I was comfortable going in and fixing it. But I wouldn't have fixed it if I couldn't ask first, I don't think. I would err on the side of sticking to the text.
If a person were uncomfortable with reading a scene and wanted to go to the author to request a revised version for reading aloud, that would seem reasonable to me, I guess. Although if it's because of content or length, I'd kind of feel like the reader should just choose a different story. The adding dialogue tags thing is a more understandable reason to ask for rewrites, although I would be more impressed with the reader if they just took it as a challenge to really work at making the different speakers in the scene distinguishable.
So I guess my overall verdict is that asking for rewrites is reasonable as a course of action, but it seems even better to choose a story in the first place that you don't need rewrites for, and to take the parts that you're unsure of as challenges, rather than trying to get them changed.