This Book Reviewer Can’t Spell for Motherf***ing S**t!

book reviewer bad grammarHave you ever had your book reviewed, only to find that the reviewer is in greater need of an editor than your original rough draft? Here he/she is going on about character development and plot, or wasting half the space with a summary of your story. But his/her text is a minefield of typos that explodes with every sentence, tearing your obsessive-compulsive need for accurate grammar to shreds.

What’s up with that? If you are a book reviewer, it is not only your job to review books, it is also your job to KNOW HOW TO SPELL! (Not to “no how two spell.”)

So, uh, yeah… I sent my book to an online reviewer–who shall remain nameless. And that was exactly what happened. I waited in excitement and fear for the publication of this 300-word assessment, which would have the power to destroy me for at least a week if bad. The review was nice, actually…four stars. They had mostly positive things to say and some criticisms, which is to be expected. (Of course, I was prone to dwell on the criticisms–but not more than the reviewer’s words, “…the boy next store.”) I was appalled by the profusion of typos and misspellings within such a short blurb of text. So much so that I couldn’t even use the thing to market my novel, because I was embarrassed by the quality of the writing in the review.

I’m posting the first few sentences of the review below, for a…

TYPO CHALLENGE!!!

How many typos can you find? (I already gave away one of them above.)

I was giving this book in exchange for an honest review

Moonpennies is a funny and slightly sad story about a girl who couldn’t see that the boy next store was the right one all along….She spent many years with the wrong guys, perhaps purposely chasing after the ones she knew she would never go the long hall with. And then she met what appeared by all rights to be the perfect guy…and no he wasn’t the boy next door.

I count at least four. If I’m being really picky, I could count up to six or seven, depending on syntax. And hey, I’m not trying to be a snob. I know no one’s perfect and I probably have my own fair share of typos, even in this very blog post. But to make that many errors in the first 80 words of a book review is a little ridiculous.

Has anyone else found this to be an issue with reviewers, or others who claim to be literary experts of a sort? Would you still market a review of your work if the review was marred with bad grammar?

One thought on “This Book Reviewer Can’t Spell for Motherf***ing S**t!

Leave a Reply to Laura Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://alannarosette.com/2013/09/05/this-book-reviewer-cant-spell-for-motherfing-st/?replytocom=4
alannarosette.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-45
82427
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5YEUOWRC2KXFSMWVJSK2HVN63D4UOJBI
<urn:uuid:7ba76141-0097-4d7a-84de-0f07ccbab3f2>
2020-10-29T19:53:15Z
192.0.78.25
text/html
sha1:6H32V72HS6TPECT7N575V7MDVELJ366B
<urn:uuid:08298f39-db68-42e5-81f2-333eceeba1a9>
https://alannarosette.com/2013/09/05/this-book-reviewer-cant-spell-for-motherfing-st/?replytocom=4
response
<urn:uuid:1a70fde7-b776-4eea-a194-2ec21985c544>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-45
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-49.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/