I'm trying to start a screenwriting group. I don't know a lot of other writers, so I posted on Craig's List. I got dozens of responses, most of them from people like me--aspirants who don't have a heck of a lot of experience, but who are trying hard.

Today, I received this e-mail:

I hope this finds you well. I was looking for a writer's group for myself and came across your Craig's List ad and followed it to your site. I get the feeling that you're sincere and truly interested in writing and supporting other writers and facilitating the creative process in general.

Because of that, I'm going to take the liberty of making a few suggestions. Your writing samples don't put your best foot forward. I swear to you, I'm not trying to be mean or arrogant or condescending. I'd really like to think that I'm offering assistance in the spirit of writers supporting each other.

In your chase/mafia/whatever scene, you hit your reader right off the bat with 'all that more sad'. Doesn't make sense, my man. Should be 'all THE more sad'.

You say the room is 'sparse and empty save for a small desk'. We know that it's sparse without being told if we know that it's empty save for the desk. It just reads clunky and amateurish.

You say the former doctor's 'shoulders are slumped from carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders'. It's redundant, Matt. You could say his shoulders were slumped from carrying the weight of the world on them or some other version of that. Shoulders, then shoulders again only a few words down the line. Just doesn't work.

And spelling one-syllable words incorrectly really makes people think that you're not worth reading, even if the words you spell correctly are. You ask how did the doctor 'loose' his license and you say the character hops 'of' the table. Obviously, it should have been 'lose' and 'off'. If a person is reading along and there's any flow, it's knocked sideways when he/she runs across such a glaring clinker.

And you should really be careful of using quotation marks to enclose anything but speech. "Homeless Man" should be 'Homeless Man' and "Police" should be 'Police'.

Anyway, just a few things that jumped right out at me. Your chances of implementing your ideas would be, I truly believe, far better if you cleaned up all the little things that are so blatant.

Sorry if I offended. I swear to you that I have only the very best of intentions.

It's a perfectly nice e-mail. And he's right (except the part about the quotation marks). I'm not mad at the guy, really.

I'm angry at myself for making these mistakes in the first place. Well, not really "in the first place." Everyone screws up on their first draft. I, for instance, have this retarded habit of typing "the" rather than "they" or "them," with frightening regularity. It's gotten to the point where I use the search function to find every instance of "the," just to be sure I didn't screw up.

But those other mistakes? I should definitely have caught them. "Loose" for "lose" is probably a typo, but I should have noticed it one of the eight hundred times I read and edited the script.

And it's not even a long sample! In ten pages, he found five errors. (He thinks he found six, but whatever.) Back when I was a script reader, I had a basic rule that, if I found two mistakes on the first page, or five mistakes in the first ten pages, I would throw the script out. If a writer can't learn basic grammar, he almost certainly hasn't learned story structure.

In other words, I would have thrown out my own script.

And that's how a stranger ruined my day.