A feast for pedants both grammarians and typesetters.

CharlasPedants' corner

Únete a LibraryThing para publicar.

A feast for pedants both grammarians and typesetters.

Este tema está marcado actualmente como "inactivo"—el último mensaje es de hace más de 90 días. Puedes reactivarlo escribiendo una respuesta.

1justjim
Editado: Sep 30, 2010, 9:34 pm

Don't eat it all at once, you'll make yourself ill.



Thank Bog there's only one page.

ps. Can we just pretend that I punctuated the topic title properly? Where can I put my face?

2lilithcat
Sep 30, 2010, 10:36 pm

It's self-published, right?

3justjim
Sep 30, 2010, 11:02 pm

I very much hope so.

4thorold
Oct 1, 2010, 5:38 am

Wonderful - thank you! Something to restore our faith in the healing power of great literature.
But you didn't do the Ford Maddox Ford page 99 test...

5Pepys
Editado: Oct 1, 2010, 7:59 am

Un-be-lie-va-ble! (Although the use of capital letters at the beginning of some words reminds me of 17c. books...)

PS - I had not seen the "science teacher and astrology". Oh my!

PPS - I would have rather given the chapter another title: The End of the Beginning, and asked the author to stop after his/her first page.

6Booksloth
Editado: Oct 1, 2010, 8:24 am

PLEASE tell us you didn't pay for it, jim?

ETA - And it's just occurred to me that this means the author had enough money to pay for the self-publishing. Can't help wondering how they earned it: presumably not teaching English?

7pinkozcat
Oct 1, 2010, 8:59 am

The spell checker seems to be working OK; not many people can spell restaurant correctly but surely it wouldn't have allowed all that upper case stuff.

Pity about the grammar checker, but.

8thorold
Oct 1, 2010, 9:55 am

The more I look at this piece, the more I begin to suspect that the opposite page says something like "Exercise 2: See how many linguistic and typographical errors you can spot in the text on page 9." The pattern of errors seems to be so arbitrary. Where on earth would someone get the idea of using initial capitals for adjectives but not for most of the proper nouns? And how did they manage to get 90% of the apostrophes right, when the average for the population at large is about 50%? I suspect a wind-up.

9MMcM
Oct 1, 2010, 10:07 am

Moon People. It has attracted creative Amazon comments.

10Pepys
Oct 1, 2010, 10:14 am

#9: yes, and the opening sentence "THIS STORY BEGINS on a Beautiful sunny day" is likely to become as famous as Bulwer Lytton's prose. A Google search for it provides many answers. This is a tour de force the author can be proud of.

12overthemoon
Oct 1, 2010, 10:41 am

maybe he Wrote all the amazon comments Himself

13thorold
Oct 1, 2010, 11:21 am

Amazon: "D. M. Courtney is Married and a father of three, a writer and also does work for National Security on the part of foreign policies and war strategies and world economic equality."

It must make you all proud to be American!

14msladylib
Oct 1, 2010, 5:51 pm

One of the comments on Amazon claims the book is satire. Huh?

15justjim
Oct 1, 2010, 8:28 pm

Thinking that no further harm could be done to my brain, I clicked on Amazon's 'Read the first chapter free' button. There has been some editing from the sample above but the prose is still more 'murderous' than 'deathless'.

Surely people get into writing because they enjoy reading. If they have read at all widely, can't they see that what they have written is not good?

I asked for, and received, a copy of a novel from one of the first authors* in the 'Hobnob with authors' group when it started. It was in many ways similar to Moon People. About 100 pages in, I took Dorothy Parkers advice. I did not toss it aside lightly.

*No names, no pointing of fingers.

16Booksloth
Oct 2, 2010, 8:26 am

#12 it Certainly look's that Way. hearbroken that i couldn't Search through the Rest. of the Book on uk amazon

#15 Surely people get into writing because they enjoy reading. If they have read at all widely, can't they see that what they have written is not good?

Oh jim! Oh, jim, jim, jim . . . . (sorrowful shaking of head). If only we could all be still naive enough to believe that. It was a beautiful fantasy but it couldn't last.

17justjim
Oct 2, 2010, 9:27 am

Sigh!

18freecyclor
Oct 2, 2010, 11:37 am

The author is probably off his meds. MOST writers love to read, but I have been offered tracts as badly written on street corners; usually dictated by ephemeral beings to characters with glittering eyes.

If it's intended to be satire, it missed. Still, have to wonder how many he's sold. It's #100,809 in books and #40,620 in Kindle books as of this morning.

19dtw42
Oct 2, 2010, 12:48 pm

My word, what a nutty world we live in. And to think of all the effort I put in correcting minor typos in articles that a few hundred people at most are going to read...

20pinkozcat
Oct 3, 2010, 4:48 am

The Kindle version seems to have been severely edited. It is possible to read a bit of it online; just a taster.

21TheoClarke
Oct 3, 2010, 7:57 am

Customers Who Shopped for the Item Also Shopped For
Caligula (The Unrated Edition)
Ferrero Nutella Made in Italy - Giant Jar 5kg (11.02lbs)
The Holy Bible, Sharif Translation (Arabic) (Arabic Edition)
Gangsta Rap Coloring Book

22kevmalone
Oct 3, 2010, 1:17 pm

23thorold
Oct 3, 2010, 4:29 pm

I'm just picturing the industrious child spreading 5kg of Nutella on the colouring book. I suppose you could use any leftovers to correct the typos in Courtney's book.

24Sophie236
Oct 6, 2010, 11:06 am

justjim, you say:

Can we just pretend that I punctuated the topic title properly? Where can I put my face?

To which I can only reply - over there in the naughty corner!

25justjim
Oct 6, 2010, 11:08 am

It's a fair cop!

26cammykitty
Oct 6, 2010, 10:11 pm

Any possibility that a typing pool of chimpanzees wrote it? Jim, I used to be in a poetry group. One day, only two of us showed up. I was fresh from college with a degree in poetry. The other member had an abysmal writing style, if I may be kind. When I suggested he read a few poets with similar interests he said, "I don't read other poets. It affects my style." I couldn't find a tactful way of pointing out that that was my point.

As for "The Beginning of The End," dang, I wish I'd seen this earlier tonight. I just spent one hour editing commas in a novel-to-be. Now I see that grammar is unnecessary!

27Sophie236
Oct 7, 2010, 3:26 am

#26 - I recently joined a local writing group and am already getting a little tired of the general: "Oooh, that's lovely - now, who's next?" attitude which prevails. When I tried - quite gently - to ask a woman (who had written something even William McGonagall would have rejected as being too clunky) what sort of poetry she read, her reaction was a faintly shocked squeak of: "But I don't read poetry!", and the other members of the group all chimed in with their agreement. You'd think I'd suggested they go for a naked swim in the Clyde, such was their reaction. Now why on earth would anyone write poetry if they loathe it so much?!

28thorold
Oct 7, 2010, 3:53 am

>26 cammykitty:,27
That always reminds me of the poet in Eating people is wrong - when asked what is the biggest problem facing English poetry today (i.e. 1953 or whatever it was), he complains that there are far more people writing it than reading it.

My experience is that about 75% of the people in any poetry group are like that (and they are usually the ones who make the tea, organise the venues, invite the speakers, etc.), 20% do read poetry, but keep to one particular genre that they attempt to reproduce in all their writing (usually either haiku or Shakespearean sonnets) and 5% spend every free weekend in the Poetry Library or at Arvon courses, write beautiful, original poems, but never say a word in meetings.

29Pepys
Oct 7, 2010, 5:51 am

#26-27-28: Do you mean that Moon people can be considered a kind of poetry? This might explain the profusely-used poetic licences...

30Booksloth
Oct 7, 2010, 7:07 am

#26 et al. It's an attitude that is cringingly prevalent among first-time writers of prose as well as poetry. I was asked to read a novel written by an acquaintance some while ago. Now don't get me wrong here, he's a very intelligent guy and his writing is lucid, his grammar impeccable and his punctuation spot on, but he never reads fiction and admits to that quite happily. Consequently, of course, the novel read a lot like a business letter (at which he excels) with the occasional flash of purple. Okay, I've read other first novels by fiction-readers that were worse but, like the rest of you, the question 'Why?' just won't leave me. Why would someone who, at best, has to interest in something, at worst despises it, have the slightest urge to reproduce it? I'd agree up to a point that reading a similar genre while in the process of writing one's own book can sometimes be confusingly influential and may be best avoided, but that doesn't mean you can't read something that is completely different. Whether you like his books or not, Stephen King's On Writing says it perfectly - there are two things you absolutely have to do if you want to be a writer and they are: write a lot and read a lot - it's the only way to learn. It rather looks as if the author of Moon People has never done either.

31thorold
Oct 7, 2010, 9:40 am

>29 Pepys:

this story begins On
Sunny Day in daytona
a Man Named braymer

32Thrin
Editado: Oct 8, 2010, 12:00 am

Or does it begin In daytona
in the Sun with a man Named brayomer?
Jim's topic's a feast
for the pedants not least
who'll find much that's in need of a coma.

33cammykitty
Oct 7, 2010, 8:24 pm

A man named brayomer
Got on his sleighomer,
went out for a hobbit to find.
Once found, it drank all his beer
And so I do here
Paid with a novella in kind.

I wouldn't call Moon People poetry. I'd just say it's illustrating the "vanity" part of the term "vanity press."

Dictionary definition: Vanity Press: A press that will publish, for a fee, the works of people who like to write but hate to read.

34CliffordDorset
Oct 11, 2010, 12:34 pm

In summary, we seem to have reached the conclusion I reached some decades ago, that people now write more than they read, and probably more than they think, and that this trend may well be getting more entrenched.

I read once that Herman Hesse was a prodigious reviewer of books, and I think this is demonstrable in the quality of both his writing and his ideas.

35cammykitty
Oct 11, 2010, 2:55 pm

CliffordDorset> "and probably more than they think" LOL, or maybe not LOL. Natalie Goldberg's books on writing have been very popular. Her philosophy could be summarized as "don't think; just write."

36dtw42
Editado: Oct 11, 2010, 3:33 pm

> "don't think; just write."
Clearly advice that Dale M. Courtney took to heart. ;^)

...On a separate note, isn't the spherical head-of-spaceship on the front cover nicked straight from 2010? (cf. http://www.librarything.com/work/7132/covers/53200557)

37JimThomson
Ene 29, 2011, 11:03 pm

>#1 I think that this abomination is a malicious attempt to send extreme Pedants into a state of catatonic shock, or at least make them nauseous. I personally was unable to continue past the second sentence before turning away. At this point I am beginning to question of value of living in a world which contains such drivel.

38TheoClarke
Sep 10, 2014, 5:22 pm

This evening as I went through a box of books (as part of the purging of my library to constrain it to the available space) I came across this remarkable work, which I had forgotten. Reading it again, I could not bring myself to discard it.

39AlanRitchie
Editado: Sep 11, 2014, 10:25 am

Is there no end to Mr Dale M. Courtney's 'imagination'? Moon People 2 and, let me see, Moon People 3 !! Well at least number three has a sub title.

"Introduction Moon People 3 Thank you for reading my book Moon People 3. My goal in Moon People 3 was to make it as action pact from start to finish just like my first two Moon People books. I had to make a "Grand Finale" so I put everything into Moon People 3. I would also like to talk to you about the Venus genesis in this book for a moment. All of the Venus technical data is accurate and the Venus genesis formula is based on an actual analytical possible "Venus Genesis". It took me a while to figure out a true Venus genesis possibility. Because of the real high pressure in the atmosphere and on the surface. Also the very high temperatures on the surface. If It wasn't for me trying to figure out how to do a genesis on Mars and Venus. I would not have believed it possible. But now I believe it really can be done on both planets, Mars and Venus and maybe easier than we all thought. You know it is true that we can not go beyond our solar system because of distance and time in our life cycle. But I submit that we should be concentrating on the planets in our solar system. Could you imagine if we could pull off a Venus genesis or even a Mars genesis. We could colonize another planet in our solar system. Wouldn't that be the ultimate! Besides all of the above. I hope you don't mind but I just had to add some "Action Pack Sci-Fi Space Adventure" to the mix also. I hope you enjoy my book Moon People 3. I really enjoyed writing it for you. If you like Moon People 3, I hope you will read 1 And 2 also. I know you will enjoy them. If you have any questions or comments please e-mail me at: :Fishinghole1112000@yahoo.com Thank you for your time and God Bless. Author Dale M. Courtney Sci-Fi Books "Moon People Trilogy" "

40krazy4katz
Editado: Sep 11, 2014, 10:41 am

I hope it's OK that I pasted Amazon's biography of this illustrious author on his LT author page (with attribution to the source, of course!). I couldn't resist the "Adviser to two Presidents,President Bush and President Obama in By-Partisan way."

41MarthaJeanne
Sep 12, 2014, 4:04 am

I set the about. You wouldn't want people to miss this discussion if they are interested in the book.

422wonderY
Sep 12, 2014, 12:10 pm

That Amazon biography reads a lot like a personal ad. Lonely hearts anyone?

43thorold
Sep 12, 2014, 2:59 pm

I hope to become film one day
Burial and cremation are so old-hat. Why not have yourself extruded instead, and spend eternity wrapped around a British Rail sandwich...

44krazy4katz
Sep 12, 2014, 3:00 pm

Wow! Do you think they can do that with 3-D printers?

45Novak
Sep 12, 2014, 5:54 pm

I'm feeling a bit silly now because I gave it five stars on LT.

46krazy4katz
Sep 12, 2014, 8:23 pm

>45 Novak: So, it would be interesting to know what you might put in a review. You shouldn't feel silly. There must have been something about it that spoke to to you. From seeing one chapter, I wouldn't know. Some people are not fans of stream-of-consciousness either. I would guess that was considered pretty ridiculous too.

47Novak
Sep 13, 2014, 4:29 am

You didn't read my review? I fort it was Rit mOre beTTer Than the bOOk;

48krazy4katz
Editado: Sep 13, 2014, 11:08 am

Oops mist it! It was so shirt and suite. Sorree!

49Novak
Sep 13, 2014, 2:41 pm

>48 krazy4katz: What would I do without you?

We must all thank >1 justjim: for starting this thread, the whole thing is such a laugh.

50krazy4katz
Sep 13, 2014, 8:46 pm

49> Siriusly, Novak. I want too no moar about yur motivashun for reeding it.

51Novak
Sep 14, 2014, 5:40 am

>50 krazy4katz: Yoo red mi revue,? Good innit?

Sumone gimee the papperbakk Book as a wind-up sum tyme aggo. I confesss I cood not reed the hole bokk and the 5 stars was only a pisstake mistake;

I did attempt to join Mr Courtney's fan club, but I was unable to understand his reply. Maybe he has reached school-leaving age by now and is working somewhere in a burger bar where he can learn more about communication.

52CliffordDorset
Sep 16, 2014, 12:27 pm

Now look here. I think everyone so far has missed the joke - and that includes me (>34 CliffordDorset:).

The clue is in the title of this epic wind-up - 'The Beginning of The End'. The instigator - I'm not going to call him/her an author - is giving us the first fireball of the Pedantry Apocalypse. He/she is probably still laughing that so many of us were fooled.

53krazy4katz
Editado: Sep 16, 2014, 12:45 pm

>52 CliffordDorset: In other words, " 'nuff sed".

54Novak
Sep 16, 2014, 1:25 pm

>52 CliffordDorset: I think everyone so far has missed the joke -

Really? Clifford, have you actually read all the comments on this thread? As pedants say "it's a question of who is taking the piss out of whom?

55abbottthomas
Sep 29, 2014, 8:03 am

Just noticed this thread - the excerpt reminded me of The Young Visiters, a very agreeable book ;-)

56msladylib
Nov 22, 2014, 11:44 pm

TheoClarke -- I almost hate it when that happens, as it makes weeding very difficult. If the book doesn't need the paper and board, I often replace it with an ebook version to save the space. I will die impoverished but with almost enough room to maneuver around my space. See, sometimes I still can't give up the lovely paper, anyway.

57Studedoo
Nov 23, 2014, 4:41 am

Wow!