I read. A LOT—like almost a book a day.
Since self-pub became a thing, we’re flooded with barely-literate offerings by “writers” who think it’s sufficient to have their friends and family read and declare something a “great read." The result is that silly affectations like punctuation, spelling, using the right damned homonym, formatting, and everything else go out the window.
My biggest pet peeve is crap like “she RACKED her brain,” “he REIGNED in his thoughts,” and OMFG, the sentence fragments and weird punctuation that would have had my fifth-grade English teacher tearing his hair out.
No proper proofreaders, editors, or any pretense of a professional involved. Anyone—ANYONE—can publish a book nowadays, and JFC, I’ve had to throw my compulsive “I need to finish what I’ve started” approach to reading out the window because life is just too short to stick with a book that has me making notes every other page to correct a ninny who has no business wasting our time with such amateurish drivel.
The Dumbing Down of America has more far-reaching implications than politics. We are definitely at the Idiocracy stage of our decline.
*sigh*
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