How to do it rite, and how to do it rong

Yes the misspelling in the title is intentional, I've not lost all sense (well I have, just not with my spelling. Yet.) I was chatting with a friend of a friend the other day about books, and they mentioned their mother in law had written a book. Given their faces were like they'd swallowed a bucketful of lemons juice and bleach, I admit I was curious. A nice surprise for me a couple days later is that I was handed the said book. It's a story about a young woman named Kate who's, let me guess, beautiful, rich, but has no personality of her own other than to fall in love with a Masai warrior. The idea of the story isn't so bad, but the amount of bad grammar (even I can do better than this!) is just appalling. Any editor or even proofreader worth their salt would not let this amount of bad grammar slip through the net. There's also the issue of nouns with stray capital letters like' Giraffe' and 'Leopard'. It's as the author is using the German rule that all nouns have capital letters. Last time I checked we were writing in English. It's clearly quaint how she's tried to use African words to make it more realistic, but when you include a dictionary reference for it, it does take away the tone of the book.


Unsurprisingly, it's been published by Authorhouse. Just a quick search shows up that it's not a trusty company to handle publishing your books. Clearly the author thought that her work would be in safe hands. It appears that Authorhouse haven't updated their spellcheck software.


I can't be too hard on the book, because after all, the author has gone out and published, and the story with some work and revision may have actually been a good story, but her hurry to publish it has created a half done job. Most publishers would say that to pay for your work to go into print is not good. But some people simply want to have their work printed and keep it between friends and family. There's nothing wrong with that. Just at least chek Ur spelling is rite b4 u publizh it.