Tagged: bad grammar

Discussion: Pet Peeves in Fiction

I have so many pet peeves about fiction because I read a lot.  Here are the ones I hate the most:

  • When authors write ‘utilize’ instead of ‘use’ every single time.  It doesn’t make you sound smarter, trust me.
  • Just bad grammar in general.  Not the deliberate kind I have on my blog (because it’s supposed to be informal) but just bad grammar out of ignorance in a published copy.
  • LOVE TRIANGLES.  Please, please, please, can we just agree to stop this travesty?  It’s so overdone that it makes me want to throw my Kindle at the wall whenever I see it.  There are more important things in life than “Which boy do I like best?”.

And this one isn’t the author’s fault (usually), but:

  • Bad formatting.  Even on NetGalley, which gives out ARCs, I expect to be able to read your book.  Some publishers just think they can download the text straight from a Word document (or whatever they use) to the .mobi format without any changes.  That results in things like totally unreadable text obscured by pictures, every single sentence being on a totally different line, random numbers and crap in the text and sometimes even parts of the text are totally unreadable because they’re supposed to be a different colour in the physical copy but light colours don’t translate well to the .mobi file.  I actually had to send a publisher a pretty annoyed note about the last one.  Please: format your book, even if it’s just an ARC.

Okay, rant over.  Now it’s your turn: what are some of your biggest pet peeves in fiction?  Is there a trope you just hate with the passion of a thousand fiery suns?  Or do you just hate when people don’t take the time to proofread properly?  Let me know in the comments below!

Discussion: Blogging Pet Peeves

Everyone reading this now is probably a regular blog reader and not just of The Mad Reviewer.  Most people that read one blog read at least a couple of blogs on a semi-regular basis, especially when those people are bloggers themselves.  But like books, there are some blogging deal breakers and pet peeves.  Here are just a few of my pet peeves:

1.  A busy layout.  A nice, unique design is perfectly okay but when you’ve got yellow spirals on a pink and purple polka dot background my brain starts to hurt.

2.  Not responding to comments at all.  I know I’m not always the speediest when it comes to replying to your comments, but I really do try and eventually 99% of comments do get a well thought out reply.  But on blogs where the blogger never responds to comments?  It just seems like they’re not that interested in what their readers have to say.

3.  Bad grammar.  Everyone makes typos; that’s pretty much expected when you’re editing yourself.  Yet when I encounter a blogger that doesnt like using capitol letters and doesnt spellchek it really starts to get irrtating.  Ya know?  Its worse when they do things like make run on sentences like this and never seem to know the difference between a colon semi-colon period exclamation point and especially a comma.

4.  Bloggers that don’t have a consistent posting schedule.  I totally get that life can get in the way of blogging sometimes.  That’s okay.  Yet when bloggers post every other day and then suddenly don’t post for a week, that gets annoying.  I like bloggers with a consistent schedule with very few exceptions.

Really, this could be an entire article but I should stop now.  After all, it’s your turn: What are your blogging pet peeves?  Why?