12th Feb: A new policy is being put in place for TRS threads: If there is no evidence provided in the Opening Post that the page is broken, the thread will be nuked immediately. See Everything You Wanted To Know About Changing Names for what constitutes evidence.
5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here
This is an index of tropes that are often indicative of plain bad writing.
When done unintentionally, these tropes are usually bad signs. When done intentionally, they're often signs of parody, comedy, or just the writer being ironic or stylized. Hopefully...
See also:
Aesop Amnesia: The more times a character is taught a lesson without learning it, the lower the viewer's opinion of him/her and you.
Angst? What Angst?: Make your characters react realistically to setbacks or tragic events. Too little angst makes them unrealistic and callous.
Character Derailment: Characters can grow, but don't suddenly mutate them into something else.
Character Shilling: Having characters suddenly talk up another character for no real reason doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Chickification: Stripping the action from an Action Girl does not work, and pisses off all the feminists in the audience.
Conflict Ball: Don't have a character cause conflict just because the plot says so.
Derailing Love Interests: Breaking up a promising relationship just to get the official couple together is not going to sit well with the viewers who care more about the characters than the concept.
Distress Ball: Running head-first into danger is a bad way to get things moving.
Explaining Your Power to the Enemy: Unless you’re trying to establish the character is really sure of themselves, this is considered a rather unintelligent thing for them to do.
Failure Hero: While having the hero lose from time to time adds some realism to the hero, if he or she loses every single fight or mission, he or she will destroy any and all tension.
Faux Action Girl: If you say that a girl is strong, then actually make them strong.
Little Jimmy: Having one character explain something to another isn't bad in and of itself, but the person receiving the explanation should have some degree of brains.
Mary Sue: A flawless, invincible character who never loses at anything makes for a boring story. Mary Sue Tropes and Common Mary Sue Traits contain lots of information on different types of Sue.
Motive Decay: If the villain has a motive, they should be expected to at least attempt to carry through with it (if not to its conclusion).
Out of Character: Moments when the character does something that he wouldn't normally do without any justification.
Wangst: Make your characters react realistically to setbacks or tragic events. Too much angst makes them unrealistic and annoying.
Wimpification: Stripping the action, common sense, and characterization from a male character to add Wangst and gender stereotypes applied to females is a good way to piss off many of the audience, including but not limited to feminists and actual gay or bisexual men.
Ass Pull: Make sure that every new character/plot point that you invoke is foreshadowed first.
Cliffhanger Copout: This is what happens when a Cliffhanger's resolution comes in the form of tweaking the continuity between back-to-back installments (usually creating Plot Holes), a refusal/failure to follow through with delivering a big Reveal after setting an audience up for one, or outright aborting a story arc.
The Chris Carter Effect: It's a good idea to actually finish things. Sooner or later, the audience will get bored with you screwing around and not getting to the point.
Coitus Ensues: Don't write a sex scene if there's no reason for the involved characters to have sex.
Ending Fatigue: The viewer should probably not be yelling "END ALREADY!"
Fridge Logic: Though much more forgivable than a Plot Hole, this can be bad if it doesn't have enough Fridge Horror or Fridge Brilliance to go along with it. If you have a complicated universe, don't gloss over the minor details.
Gratuitous Rape: Don't shove in a rape scene just for the hell of it.
Idiot Plot: Unless it's part of their character, the plot should not be forced to move forward solely by people making stupid decisions.
It Gets Better: Just as the viewer shouldn't demand the work to end already as with Ending Fatigue, they shouldn't be forced to sit through hours of exposition or padding to get to the actual plot.
Just Eat Gilligan: If there's an obvious solution to the problem(s) that drives the story, you would think the characters would go for it rather than ignoring it.
Kudzu Plot: It's fine to have a dozen different story threads at once, but you have to be able to tie them together. If they go off into infinity without ever being tied, who's going to care about any of them? The pieces of your Jigsaw Puzzle Plot have to fit.
Offstage Villainy: We need to see that the villain is evil. Being told so doesn't automatically make him/her "evil".
Unfortunate Implications: Be careful which characters you put through hell and in what ways, because it might give viewers the wrong idea.
A Wizard Did It: "It's magic," is not an explanation. Even in fantasy unless explained very well, it will be seen as a fantasy Ass Pull.
Voodoo Shark: When patching over a Plot Hole creates a different, possibly more troublesome, problem.
Yo Yo Plot Point: It's okay if a few plot points repeat themselves throughout the series, but if it's the same story every other episode, your audience is bound to get bored.
Senseless Styles
In amateur writing (or stuff that just simply didn't get the proper proofreading), bad writing is sometimes inherent in the form and presentation of the work itself:
Author Filibuster: The reader/viewer/player/etc is (theoretically) interested in the plot. Stopping it so that you can talk about something that's important to you will only make them less interested in what you're writing.
Wall of Text: The formatting (or lack thereof) combined with a lot of redundant words makes the text seem impenetrable, and will make the reader lose the track after a few lines.
The War on Straw: Not a direct cause of bad writing, but a frequent component of it nevertheless.
Examples Are Not Arguable: If you're not sure if what you're writing is an example or not, take it to the discussion page instead of coating your example with Weasel Words.
Examples Are Not Recent: When writing an example, avoid using the word "recent." What's considered recent now won't be in a couple of years. It just makes more trouble for other tropers to edit out the word "recent" once it isn't recent anymore. Act as if every work that was ever published came out several years ago.
Not a Subversion: Misuse of the word "subverted." A common sign of this is use of phrases such as "partially subverted" or "somewhat subverted."
Sink Hole: When making a Pot Hole, make sure that the article being linked bears relevance to the Pot Holed text.
Square Peg Round Trope: Make sure that the example that you want to add fully fits the trope. If it's "not really an example", then it's not really an example, and it shouldn't be added.
This Troper: Writing about oneself in a Main wiki article. The goal is to make Main articles sound like a single person is editing the article, not multiple people. Besides, personal comments just clog up the articles.
Type Labels Are Not Examples: Any relevant context needed to explain the example should be given in the example itself. Don't simply label it "type X" and force the reader to open a separate page just so they can understand what it means.
Weblinks Are Not Examples: If one has a trope example, one should write it down, in adequate detail, where it is relevant, not rely on a URL link to some other page to explain what it is.
Word Cruft: When writing an example, just stick to writing the example and try to avoid saying useless things that don't need to be said.
Canon Defilement: People who are reading your Fan Fic probably enjoy the show for what it is. Not for what you would like it to be. Seeing beloved characters mangled into whatever form you desire is probably going to cut down on your audience, unless you're Neil Gaiman*
And even he shows a great deal of respect for Canon while mangling it
.
Captain Obvious Aesop: Don't try and teach your audience something that they already know.
Clueless Aesop: Don't try to put something in a place where it doesn't belong.
Demonization: Some of your potential audience may actually see where this position is coming from, if not actually agree. You'll turn them off by your exaggerated portrayal. It also makes it seem like the position you hold isn't nearly as solid as you think, since it can only stand up to strawmen.
IKEA Erotica: Sex should only be as boring as it is to the participants.
I Suck At Summaries: If you can't be bothered to summarise your fic properly, then why should people be bothered to read it?
Lost Aesop: If you're going to present some "truth", make sure you do it.
Moral Dissonance: Don't have the hero behave contrary to his usual morality and be completely oblivious to it. Also see Angst? What Angst?.
Narm (when caused by the writing): Make your dramatic/climactic scenes convincing, not cheesy. Don't go over-the-top. Make it realistic. Think about how a person in Real Life would behave in the situation.
Nightmare Retardant (when caused by the writing): If something is supposed to be scary, either don't show it or actually make it scary.
