Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Maybe some people just shouldn't write
I recently saw a question about becoming a published author posted on a forum.
It was so poorly written that I sent a private email to the writer.
I said, "I hope that you will be more careful when querying agents and writing books than you were in writing your message here. You repeatedly put an apostrophe in a plural where it did not belong, and you left out several apostrophes and a question mark, and had unnecessary commas, and misspelled words."
The response: "Thanks for the grammar check-up. Un-fortunately, I spell out words as I THINK they should be. I am not proud of this but the fact is that I failed English class everytime I went to class. I never understood proper placement, of punctuation, or the other "encyclopedia" of English rules. Do you think that agents will, really, scrutinize a work, so closely?"
...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Another Outskirts author is born!
ReplyDelete"Do you think that agents will, really, scrutinize a work, so closely?"
ReplyDeleteUm. Yes. Yes, I really do think so.
Oh boy.
ReplyDeleteI've seen a lot of posts like this in the CreateSpace message boards and I usually don't say anything because I assume they are kids-- teenagers.
So sad.