Here's another willing BR checking in. I'm a bit late to the party, and a bit new to it all, but I hope that won't stop people from considering my offer.
Full disclosure: I have never been a beta reader in any fandom before, and as a fiction writer, I'm just entering a stage where I'm willing to show other people my writing.
That said, I have done more than my fair share of proofreading and critiquing other people's writing in other contexts, and that includes academic writing, prose, and even poetry on a few occasions.
My strengths as a beta reader for fiction include:
- Articulating the way a story makes me feel.
- Identifying plot holes, inconsistencies, and little tidbits that seem not to fit with the normal behavior of a character as I've come to know him/her in this specific story.
- Brainstorming story ideas (to incorporate, mangle or discard at the sole discretion of the author).
- Identifying sentences, or whole segments of the story that don't quite 'sound right', style-wise.
Weaknesses include:
- The fact that English isn't my first language (in fact, it's my third, but I do spend quite a lot of time reading, writing and communicating in English, and I listen to a lot of English-language radio).
- My tendency to use a lot of really long sentences in my own writing, which means it's unlikely that I will call you on that if you do it yourself.
I will read and comment on basically any kind of story, as long as you present it to me in digestable portions (up to 10.000 or so words at a time).
If you've made it to the end of this litany, and you still think I might be the person you're looking for, please feel free to PM me, and we'll take it from there.
