When I saw this post at Random Rambling, it reminded me of an irritating sentence I had read in a novel recently.
Now, you might think a sentence like “All who work His will are not among your host,†wouldn’t cause a great deal of irritation, but in context it was an indication that the writer had his head up his… ahem, when he wrote the sentence. And how in the world it slipped past copy editor, I’d not know. The sentence clearly indicates a subject “All who work His will†that is NOT included in the object “your host”. Pretty clear: one group has no members in the other group. But from the context one can tell that what the writer meant was “Not all who work His will are among your host.†Not an equivalent statement to the first one.
Gee. Normally I enjoy the daylights outa that writer’s work. But when he writes crap like that, it’s at the very least distracting, irritating. Thereafter, I was on the lookout for the next failure in logical thought, which kinda put a crimp in the old “suspension of disbelief†necessary for thorough enjoyment of the novel. Sure enough; I found plenty more where that came from… *sigh*
On a blog—a kinda informal journal such as this one or most of those I read regularly—I’d not expect careful wordsmithing, but coming from a guy who makes his living crafting stories, writing like that is just lazy, sloppy, a big suck on a sour lemon.
And no, I’m not mentioning the writer’s name, cos his other books have been better-written than this one. I guess everyone has a lazy spell, eh?