Spelling, punctuation, grammar - do they matter?
The above is the title of a thread in a forum on the alternative publisher’s site (my term for self-publishing) where I’m hanging out quite a bit these days.
Anyway, this was my contribution to the mix:
My 2 yen worth (I live in Japan). I make my living as a wordsmith. I edit, proofread, typeset, and write manuals, articles for magazines, industry reports, etc. (I don’t translate, though), and I am surrounded by the most egregious examples of English that you can imagine; in bars, restaurants, advertising, instructions - in fact, almost everywhere where there is a printed English phrase, there is a grammar, spelling or stylistic mistake. Here in Japan, it is considered that a native speaker is the magic answer to this poor English.
But not all “native speakers” are equal. So many times I have been handed a piece of complete and utter rubbish, with the advice that “a native speaker’s been through it, so it’s OK - just a final check”. When I read it, I wonder what sort of “native speaker of English” this was. Someone who speaks like totally awesomely kewl, d00d, and writes like (s)he speaks, maybe, or someone who slept their way through the whole semester when punctuation was being taught. Because there are more Americans than other native English speakers in Japan, the Americans with poor English outnumber the British, Australians, etc., but poor English is far from being an American exclusive.
Anyway, my point is that there is a difference between good and bad English, and it’s one that non-English speakers actually do recognize and are prepared to pay money for. A good style will carry you over many mechanical defects, but to me, a good style includes the correct use of grammar, the correct use of words (it’s versus its, for example) and correct spelling. Only then does the writing achieve its aim - of communicating without drawing attention to itself. One of the nicest compliments paid to my writing was by a commercially published author, who claimed that he didn’t notice my writing, which carried him effortlessly through the story (this is a different book to the one I have up on Lulu at the moment). Of course, in books like Vernon God Little (to take an extreme example), the language forms an integral part of the book, but that’s an exception rather than the rule.
So… Yes indeed, these things matter. It’s a complete turn-off to me to see too many speling mistokes and grammatical error in a sentence, which is poorly, punctuated. It annoys me far more than a badly laid-out book, because it says to me that the author doesn’t care about (a) his or her standing as a writer, or (b) about his or her readers. I can almost promise you that no commercial publisher will even consider reading past the first page of a manuscript that contains glaring elementary linguistic errors (unless you’re an illiterate celebrity, of course). Self-publishing is not an excuse for laziness or sloppiness, though.
If you are an author reading this rant, and you feel you are incapable of judging and improving the mechanical quality (spelling, grammar, etc.) of your work, do find someone who is capable of doing these things, even if you have to pay them. If you don’t, in the long run, anything self-published will be tarred with the “amateur” brush, and no-one except Aunt Edna will buy it.
Of course, as a writer/editor, I have an ax to grind when it comes to raising linguistic standards, but it saddens me that a fair number of people appear to think otherwise.
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