Thread: Seriousness What about commas?
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Old 10-12-2010, 01:17 AM   #53
AprilHare
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In ebooks one can sometimes see crimes against grammar (and spelling) due to OCR.
It isn't necessarily because they're uneducated people - greed overrules the need for proofreading.
And just for the record: I wasn't taught grammar in a traditional sense at (public) school. The New South Wales government thought it would overburden young minds to teach them the tenants of grammar, and thought people could learn grammar by osmosis (or something).
I hope I haven't made too many grammatical errors..
Quote:
Originally Posted by GraceKrispy View Post
I've been reading indie books and reviewing them, and there have been at least three I've read in the past few months that have abused and terrorized (or outright neglected!) commas. What is up with that?

While I'm not a high school English teacher, and I do tend to ramble in posts at times (because I write like I think.... I'm much more careful when writing up research and such), I feel I have a fairly good understanding of the English language, commas included.

Is it that schools no longer teach grammar rules? I can attest to the fact that the school where I worked for many years (K-12) did not, in fact, do much teaching in the area of grammar. When I was in secondary school, English and Literature were two different classes. Now they are one, combined and shortened.

After reading this last book, I even looked up every reputable site I could find about the rules governing the use of commas to be sure I wasn't crazy and making up my own rules for those blasted things. I wasn't.

If I'm reading along, trying to enjoy a fairly interesting book, and I see a sentence like this:


I'm thrown off. I'm distracted by the missing commas as well as the misplaced commas. Because of those commas, the cadence of the sentence is wrong, and I'm left to try to discern meaning. All I really end up doing is proofreading it in my head, which takes my time and energy away from enjoying the story. And some of these books are getting 5 star reviews left and right, for the "awesome story" and "what a thriller" plotlines, and I just can't get past the writing.

Is this an insidious phenomena in my very own head? Anyone else noticing this?

Spoiler:
(And if anyone would like to point out any mistakes I've used in punctuation in this thread because it makes him or her feel better, that's fine with me. It may have been a typo, it may have been an honest mistake, or it may be ignorance... but I'm not publishing this in ebook format and expecting people to pay $9.99 to read my errors.)
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