And so another Friday is upon us.
I love ranting with you all, so here's a Grammar Rant for this fine, sunny Friday:
I'm not a magazine reader by any stretch, but sometimes I get desperate to read something -- anything. So, being a person who enjoys a good glass of wine, I was recently captured by an article entitled, "Goodbye Burdgundy...and hello pinot noir".
I got to the third sentence and stopped dead in my proverbial tracks:
I've tried, but simply found every single one that I've drank to be wholly underwhelming and devoid of personality.
I've drank?
I've DRANK??
I'm sorry, there's no excuse for a mistake like that. Especially in a published article. Especially in a piece written by a sommelier for a monthly feature entitled "Exquisite Taste."
Let's review:
I drink.
I drank.
I have drunk.
You're thinking, "But Authoress, it might've been a simple typo."
Indeed. But why didn't somebody catch it?
And it gets worse. I can prove it wasn't a typing error, a mere slip of the finger.
Know why? On the second page of the article, it happens again:
I've drank Burgundy with others that swear it will turn me into a convert, but alas it wasn't to be.
This isn't a simple typing slip, folks. It's grammatical illiteracy.
And to really nitpick, it should read "with others who swear," not "with others that swear." "Who" for people, "that" for non-people.
Unless you're writing a story about talking animals.
And, too, there should be commas flanking the word "alas."
Actually, the whole sentence kind of sucks.
And, um, so does the entire article.
It's puzzling, really. Because the author uses words like "affinity," "formulaic," "austere," and "conversely." So either he's got a Thesaurus on his desktop or there's a complete disconnect between his vocabulary and his ability to use it to construct sentences.
Ugh, ugh, and triple ugh.
I can't seem to get away from unedited writing this week -- first Terry Brooks, and now this.
Do you have some grammar pet peeves to share? I might feel a tad less hoity toity if you do.
Just a tad.
Miss Snark's First Victim
I hate this one:
ReplyDelete"But, as I was saying..."
It's the comma after the but that bugs me. Makes me stop reading every time. It just irritates the hell out of me. You don't see it that often, but a writer friend does it practically in every paragraph.
I was reading a Silhouette Nocturne last week, and participles were dangling every-freaking-where. I really hate that. And in a published book, no less. Fire that copy editor!
Tags. I cannot STAND when there are periods ending a line of dialogue that has a tag line. And it's almost pathetic when there are multiple errors and NO ONE SEEMS TO HAVE CAUGHT THEM. One typographical error I can understand and overlook. We all make mistakes.
ReplyDeleteBut I read The Blood King my Gail Z. Martin the other, uh, week, and there were freaking tag mistakes EVERYWHERE. (Periods ending DL with tags; pronouns capitalized inappropriately. Commas ending DL where THERE WAS NO TAG LINE.)
We won't get into the other various typos but good gawd, where the hell is the copy editor, or does the author just not understand basic tag punctuation?
*seethes*
~Merc
I read "The Children's Hospital" this winter.
ReplyDeleteThe typos were INSANE. I can't even list them all here, but let me just say that a character who is mentioned repeatedly but doesn't actually appear in the story was called the WRONG NAME several times.
This was both a case of unedited writing (the book was too long by at least a third), and also
a case of un-copy-editing.
And a lot of it was just Chuck Palahunik-style gross.