Following on from my post yesterday kitty_poker1 has linked me to a really fascinating post she did a while back on writing and betaing. Read it here

Some of these things cannot be said often enough and I really cannot stress how important a good beta is. I've had some wonderful betas in the past but I've had some really poor ones too. A good beta can really make the difference between a fic being good or not.

Really, you don't want to see what my rpf_big_bang fic looked like before Kitty got her claws into it *g*