I'm looking through the mystery section and some of those blurbs for the books scare me. If an author can't write a grammatically correct paragraph when it's that critical -- when it's the one thing that will make a prospective reader check out the book or move on -- what will I find
inside the book? Do they care that little about their own writing?
For example:
Quote:
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Having lived through the horrors that can come from the hands of someone you thought loved you; she decided never loving again would prevent more emotional scarring.
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Somewhere, a comma is crying.
I'll admit, sheepishly, to being a fanfiction reader (and worse, an occasional writer of the stuff). Sturgeon's Law is not only fully in effect in fanfic, it's probably squared. Maybe cubed. Bratty teenagers who have proven themselves unable to construct a simple English sentence often defend their broken writing with "You know what I'm saying, so how I put the words together doesn't matter. Besides, the idea is the only thing that's important, not how I write it." It's highly disturbing to see the same type of poor writing in the work of would-be professionals. I wonder, if questioned about those badly-written blurbs, would they make the same excuses?
Is this what writing is coming to? A few decades from now, will publishers' catalogs look like fanfiction.net? The mere thought of it makes me shudder.