It isn’t often we hear from a best-selling author of young adults’ fiction, so let’s make the most of us. He insisted on concealing his identity, but you can probably guess who it is. You just can’t hide that kind of fame under a bushel.
You will also notice how the market strives for Diversity by making sure that published novels, no matter how many there may be, are so shaped to be indistinguishable from one another. That way, if you’ve read one young adults’ fantasy, it’s sort of like you’ve read them all. The new ones won’t be so confusing then.
I hate to complain, but if your guest, the best selling author of young adult fiction was any good, he would have titled his piece “How to Right Goodly”. 🙂
“The rools Of gramer thay is maid to bee Broakin!”
Amazingly, many of the rules of punctuation were did not come from English Majors, but from printers, who has to typeset text written by others, and wanted ways to make it more intelligible to the reader. I hated English classes, and did poorly in them. It was always a source of frustration in my school years, because, while I could read and comprehend English quite easily, my handwriting was atrocious, and I often felt persecuted by English teachers. There’s one joker I’d love to have a talk with, to this day.
Any writing skills I have acquired happened in the age of computers. Starting with a Brother Word Processor, and moving forward, I learned to apply rules of grammar and punctuation to writing, from that point on. There is a book named “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” which is specifically for refreshing the grammar and punctuation skills of adults who were thrust back into writing, when computers came along. It was more than helpful.
Back when they had us diagramming sentences (how I hated that!), there were no personal computers, no word-pressing–so you kind of needed legible handwriting. My mother was good at teaching that–much better than the teachers at school.
Now, when it comes to handwriting, just forget it! Hardly anyone can write cursive anymore.
The generation before mine came out of school with beautiful handwriting, easily read.
Seems a shame to have lost it.