Yeh, yeh: I read far too many books. Blah-blah-blah.
Sadly, I had competent instruction in English when I was a lad. Occasionally I even choose to write as though I paid attention during class, even though I do not ask folks to pay me for what I write. But folks who expect me to pay them for their writing really ought to pay attention to proper grammar (I allow some leeway for dialog, since one can’t expect all the characters in a piece of fiction to be literate *heh*), spelling and word usage.
A couple of examples from today’s readings illustrate my lament/gripe:
From a “real” publisher comes a book sprinkled with loads of grammar, usage, spelling and punctuation errors. One sample: “The McCarthy’s [sic] did not comment. . . ” Apostrophe Abuse is prevalent and shows up in many ways, but I really hate it that more and more writers (and proofreaders and editors) have NO idea how to form plurals from proper nouns.
From the preface material in a self-pub (although I understand “Indie Published” is the preferred term nowadays) book, I gathered the author was tickled pink with his wife’s “proofreading” and his editor’s “professionalism”. *shudder* Not often a good sign. Sure enough, the thing’s littered with errors most commonly found in works written by hormone-lobotomized seventh-graders. *argh!*
Read two more by another author yesterday. Were it not for the *cough* “indifferent” *cough* editing/proofreading, I might have given the books as many as four out of five stars on Amazon for books of the genre. As it was, I was generous to give the books three stars. I would prefer to have the author, any proofreaders and editors at hand to personally dope slap. *sigh* Of course, the author was another of those who thanked his proofreader(s)/editor(s). (As I said earlier, usually a bad sign.)
Yeh, yeh, on top of my other reading (*sigh* mostly background to “news” and other fictional non-fiction), five novels in the past two days. One of them was competently written/proofread/edited. One. So far. . .
Welcome to the post-literate society, where published works must rise only to almost the literary quality of a Twitter or FarceBook post.
