Seen on FarceBook: “bordum.” No, cupcake, for you that’s “bore-dumb.” For everyone else, it’s “boredom.” *sigh*
If You Can Read This
DON’T thank a teacher, at least not necessarily. Literacy ain’t what the “edumacationists” say it is, and, for the most part, is NOT what schools foster. (Yes, there are exceptions, but the system we now have militates against literacy. The exceptions swim against the tide. Let’s remain grateful for them.)
The Literacy Crisis in American Schools
Sidebar: teachers in schools were entirely incidental to whatever literacy I attained while in school and get no credit whatsoever for whatever literacy I have managed to acquire outside school. Seriously.
Cliff Notes Lives
It’s really sad to hear people talk about how they “grew up with The Jungle Book” and realize they’re talking about an animated (or, perhaps an earlier live action) movie they recall from their childhood, NOT the book (or the sequel). The best of the movies were derived from just three Mowgli stories taken from the book. All the rest of the riches the book offers? Lost to these folks. Sad. New “Jungle Book” movie is being produced by one of these “Cliff Notes” kids. (But I’m almost certain I slander Cliff Notes summations, since I’m sure Cliff Notes dealt with the whole book.)
A Tale of Two Cities? I’m sure however many folks still relate to Dicken’s tale, most have never read the book, and most of those either read a Cliff Notes (or, if they’re old enough, a Classics Illustrated comic version) summary or sat through the late 50s movie with Dirk Bogarde that featured a Reader’s Digest version of the book. LOADS missing.
And so it goes. If it’s not a recent crappy Hollyweird movie, chances are it’s terra incognita/ignota to most folks. That’s just sad.
May I? Please?
May I dope slap someone for using “abit” to stand in for “a bit”? Please? Pretty please with sugar on top? Would it help my case if I told you the same folks used the adjective “backdoor” when they meant “back door”? Hmm?
[excessively polite mini-rant /off]
Warning Signs
1.) The book blurb for a self-pub contains orthographic and grammar errors as egregious as this, first sentence of a blurb did,
“A global flu pandemic has wiped out ninety nine [sic] percent of the worlds [sic] population.”
The first page of the book includes, among other offenses, “He staggered back, unable to breath.”
You might well, with signs like this, think, “Hmmm, Cupcake, if you haven’t bothered to learn basic English, why should you expect to have English speakers/readers buy your book?”
Oh, and if “Cupcake” thinks so highly of his own subliterate capabilities (and is so dismissive of his readers) as to eschew paying a competent line editor to mend his execrable grasp of grammar and vocabulary, well, that’s another strike against him and his “literary” non-efforts.
(And yeh, the butchery of English continued in that case, until I finally exited the snippet and sought some mind-cleansing in better-written text.)
Note: there is a lot of non-fiction written nowadays that is just as bad as in the fiction referred to above. Damn democratic influences in the arts! *heh*
#gagamaggot Number 5,386, 237
*sigh* This sort of thing used to baffle me, until I realized just how woefully subliterate (in general and especially historically) more and more people are nowadays. From a book blurb (for a book probably best avoided):
“. . . a cop finds a trove of ancient documents that may — or may not — be an undiscovered Shakespeare play. . .”
“Ancient,” used in reference to historical documents, almost always refers to Classical Antiquity — ancient Greece, Rome or the Middle East, etc. Sometimes it is loosely used in reference to medieval and earlier times, mostly by folks who are only moderately aware historically.
Shakespearean manuscripts could not be considered “ancient” by even the loosest, least meaningful sense of the term, since Shakespeare died just under 500 years ago, smack in the middle of the Renaissance.
Since these book blurbs for self-pub books are most often written by the “authors,” I’d say giving this book a pass might just be a sensible time saver.
Good, Bad and Downright Ugly
I “buy” more than a few free ebooks. Book blurbs, reader reviews, and sample text allow me to filter many unworthy offerings, but some do slip through. And then there are the borderline examples. Well-written, for the most part, interesting stories (again, for the most part) with characters that seem more genuine than not (not that “genuine” is always good, when a young, semi-or-sub-literate writer is genuinely reflecting his/her own cohort *sigh*), etc., but with gaping holes in literacy, research, or understanding of a few basic concepts.
Many of the problems noted here could be easily mended were it not for the frequently overriding problem of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. It seems many writers don’t feel a need to have competent, literate line and copy editors (or are too chintzy to pay for such). After all, they have their attendance certificate (diploma) from some college or university, so that MUST mean they are literate and competent, and do not need to seek out someone who is literate and competent to line/copy edit their “masterwork,” right? Wrong. Even the most literate and competent writer can use literate, competent editing by a third party, preferably an adult. No, a real one.
The worst problems aren’t language or character development or plotting. No, the worst problems in a lot of writing in many of these freebies by millennial “grups” lie in their basic world view, their misunderstandings of human nature formed by living in a morass of media fantasy instead of
An example (I’ll name one author who deserves praise and not name another who tried really, really hard [#gagamaggot] to write a decent story but failed, “deserving” only a “participation trophy”): Many of the freebies I read are introductions to series. Good practice. . . if the intro is a good read. Some of them I read specifically to review for recommendation/disapprobation for my Wonder Woman who is always seeking new writers to appeal to her students, especially her 7th/8th grade students. This practice led me to read (for review) a book by Shelley Adina, “Lady of Devices,” a steampunk “romance” (NOT capitalized), where, for the first book at least, “romance” ~ “adventure,” as it once meant. I was so surprised by the quality of the writing (in all aspects–good use of English, good plotting, character development and descriptive narrative, etc., as well as a really sensible Victorian feel to the book that I have since read everything else Adina has written in the series,* and felt privileged to pay to do so.
Another book I just finished attempted to do what Adina accomplished, in the same genre, but the writer was both not competent in those areas where I praise Shelley Adina and apparently did not see the need (or was too cheap to pay) for competent, literate line/copy editing. On top of that, the writer committed the cardinal sin of placing “message” above story and periodically throughout the text ended up pontificating on points of the society she had designed with which she disagreed, instead of letting the story simply speak for itself. Bad writing, that, really bad writing.
And that was on top of presenting some basic concepts of human nature and relationships in what I have come to expect to be typical of jejune, shallow, millennial crybabies.
Sad. There were moments of sound grade “C” writing, with gusts up to “B+” on occasion, but I had to give the book a “One star that should be zero stars” rating and could NOT recommend it for young adolescents, as I resoundingly recommended the Adina books.
Seriously, most of these young writers really, really need to submit their work for correction and critique to literate, competent adults (NOT something they are likely to find among their circles of acquaintances) before releasing it into the wild.
*She’s also written some contemporary “juvies” directed toward (it seems middle school girls. I’ve not read those, but I did suggest that my Wonder Woman look into them for her libraries, given the quality of Adina’s steampunk books.
Fostering Subliteracy
Speaking of a past event, with the context implying a past perfect contrafactual, some moronic TV writer has a character spread illiterate speech with, “If that limo didn’t have Lojack. . . ” But the limo DID have Lojack, and so the character was found and rescued. So, “If that limo hadn’t had Lojack. . . ”
These kinds of exceptionally stupid errors with tenses indicate a failure of temporal awareness, a failure of reasoning ability, and extreme laziness. When writers do it, it’s also a sign of contempt for their readership/audience. Really? Yep. If they had any respect for their readership/audience, such writers would have learned how to form such phrases literately, correctly.
I despise such lazy, disrespectful, unethical thieves. Yes, thieves. They take money for supposedly using their writing skills but have not bothered to acquire the skills they accept pay for (or are too disrespectful of their readership/audience to properly use skills they have. Frauds. Such people should be lashed daily with dangling participles, for the rest of their disgusting lives.
Subliteracy in the Hivemind #3,245,967
Jonah Goldberg, writing about King Putz’s LAST SOTU blather:
“Several times I heard him say things that sounded politically ill-advised and so I checked the prepared remarks thinking that maybe I misheard. But I didn’t.”
Corrected (with emphasis added):
“Several times I heard him say things that sounded politically ill-advised and so I checked the prepared remarks thinking that maybe I had misheard. But I hadn’t.”
Getting the tense right improves clear transmission of meaning. Sloppy writing such as the example of Goldberg’s comment above, is indicative of sloppy thinking. When a guy is getting paid (as one must assume Goldberg is) for writing, getting it right is part of his job.
UN-Freaking-Believable
I recently read a fantasy novel by a 30-something kid who writes like a literate (for a seventh-grader) junior high school student. Irritating. He’s apparently a self-inflicted victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, from the evidence of the kinds of glaring errors he makes that would have been easily avoided had he done his homework.
*sigh*
Example: horses and horseback riding are featured throughout the book (and from what I have seen in preview material, the next book in the series as well, where the snippet I saw mentioned horses braying *shudder*). One would think that if horses and riding horses were significant elements of a novel, then the writer would at least casually pick up a copy of Horse and Rider or maybe even stroll on down to a stable to get a wee tad of realism to use. Oh, wait! Talk to a real person with experience with horses! Nah. Too hard.
Nope. Instead, Every. Single. Thing. Wrong. Completely stupid. Way to massacre any chance of suspension of disbelief, doofus.