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Old 02-09-2011, 04:17 PM   #23
bill_mchale
Wizard
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Posts: 1,451
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Maryland, USA
Device: Nook Simple Touch, HPC Evo 4G LTE
Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer View Post
Feel free to exercise your right to buy/not buy, read/not read, like/not like, whatever you see fit... you'll get no complaint from me. But the scare quotes around the word author and the assumption that the only possible reasons an author would write this way are ignorance or laziness, is completely unnecessary.

It's just not your cup of tea... and that's fine.
According to the McCarthy (in a quote I lifted from Wikipedia's bio on him), "blot the page up with weird little marks."

I don't think that quote implies ignorance or laziness, but it does seem to suggest a rather dysfunctional view of the written language. Punctuation, particularly quotation marks, help make a text easier for the reader to follow. I can think of some authors who would be completely unreadable without quotation marks.

Its been a while since I last tried to read McCarthy, but I suspect that even his writing could be made clearer if he started using quotation marks (at the very least it indicates the difference between a direct and indirect quote).

--
Bill
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