![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
That’s right, kids, to celebrate the end of the second week of the second month of International Slushpile Awareness Month, here’s an all-new Reason with some slush references thrown in.
There is a myth about publishing, propagated and regularly renewed by bad writers desperate to justify their futile reveries. The self-sustaining power of the myth is such that writers in its thrall cannot see, much less correct the basic problems in their writing — problems so fundamental, the writers are forever doomed to get form rejections that don’t alert them to how severe these problems are. This myth is:
Publishers employ copy editors to fix the spelling and grammar in your manuscript.
This myth is pervasive because in the most literal sense, it is true. Publishers do employ copy editors, and their role (in part) is to fix errors of spelling and grammar during a book’s pre-publication phase. But in the funhouse mirror that is the bad writer’s state of perpetual denial, this simple fact has been tortured into a comforting, yet utterly untrue corollary:
It dont mater how bad is my speling or grammar, cause thats’ what copyeditors is for.
And thus a sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate’d, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn’t initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.
I don’t think it’s much of a secret that this is the fault of the massive wussification of education in Western countries over the last forty years. After the peace movement of the 1960s, the powers that be decided that kids were getting too darn smart, and a smart kid was much less likely to say “sure Mister President, I’ll spend six weeks learning to field-strip an M-16 and having my sense of self systematically destroyed so I can be sent to murder some poor, ill-trained conscripted suckers with a different skin color trying to defend their country with outdated weapons you sold to them before you decided that stealing their natural resources was cheaper than buying them”. It’s far easier to maintain a massive standing army ready to fight and die for no reason other than “the President says it’s cool” if you don’t teach them to think for themselves in the first place.
So, now we’re on the second generation of kids who are getting a free pass through the school system while barely learning to read and write at a functional level. The frightening thing is that some of them still think they can be writers — while the saddening thing is that if the education system was designed to develop intelligent and capable citizens instead of consumers and soldiers, they could have been writers.
Some of them (surely) have interesting lives, and strong ideas — it’s just that they lack the linguistic capability to express themselves, and what’s left of today’s reading public have less and less patience to wade through books that read like they were typed by throwing pebbles at a keyboard across the room.
And — here’s the kicker — for the same reasons, skilled copyeditors are now rarer and more expensive than when your high-school-dropout granddaddy was nurtured by his publisher through a long and unremarkable midlist career. Publishers are desperate for the Next Big Thing, and they’re prepared to spend even less money on even more books than ever before. So, while slushpile manuscripts are getting worse, less money and time is being put into polishing the rough gems. These days it’s write well, and sell well, or get the hell out.
(You might wonder, if literacy levels are dropping, why you can’t write for people who are just as illiterate as you. Simple answer: illiterate people don’t buy books. The people who do buy books love words enough to recognize lots of them.)
If you’re one of these writers, with great ideas and a passion for writing but lacking confidence in spelling and grammar, you’re just fscked. Give up. You’re wasting your time writing when you should be reading — Modern English Usage, preferably, but at least read the spelling suggestions and grammar warnings in your word processor.
To help you figure out if you’re in this category, here are some different types of spelling errors, ranked in increasing order of ineptitude:
This last category is the (slush)killer, the “auto-no”, the point at which your manuscript may simply become unreadable. They’re especially dangerous because spellcheck software won’t pick them up; indeed you may only discover them when a patient and better-educated friend looks up from your manuscript and says “What the fsck does this mean?”
Really, if you’re going to write in English, you’re expected to understand it. Category four blunders are like interrupting a serious conversation to tell a bad joke: people might ignore one and pause politely for two, but three or more and someone’s going to throw something at you. You should be glad at this point that your manuscript didn’t get published — a hardcover hurts more.
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“Some of them (surely) have interesting lives, and strong ideas — it’s just that they lack the linguistic capability to express themselves, and what’s left of today’s reading public have less and less patience to wade through books that read like they were typed by throwing pebbles at a keyboard across the room.”
What’s really scary about that assessment is looking at the number of college graduates who majored in English or creative writing who still haven’t grasped this. I realize that most college-level English programs are nothing but a plot to prevent wage inflation at Borders and Barnes & Noble, but I am constantly amazed and appalled at the number of people who spent thousands of dollars on a four-year degree and got nothing from their efforts. I’m not surprised when I come across an MBA who can’t write a coherent sentence (mostly because they only got that MBA because Mommy and Daddy wanted something for eight years of keggers other than a coke habit and syphilis), but repeatedly coming across English graduates who can’t put together an articulate paragraph brings forth despair. (Take my word for it: after listening to one of these darlings get frustrated when you ask for elaboration on “You know, that girl who was in that thing…”, screaming “PROPER NOUNS, MOTHERFUCKER! USE ‘EM, OR I’LL KILL YOU!” is sometimes the only option.)
Oh, and should I bother to flaggelate the deceased equine and note that the absolute worst examples of this phenomenon all want to write science fiction? They don’t know anything about the genre, they don’t read any of it, and they sure as hell won’t buy it, but they’ll blow insane amounts of money on classes and workshops so that they can prepare to regale the public with their halfassed Star Wars ripoff…once they’re “discovered” while shelving the latest Orson Scott Card at Frumpy Fiftysomething’s Used Books.
Paul, the chip on your shoulder is so massive that it must be taken into account when plotting orbital trajectories. It affects the tides in Honolulu. It was first observed by Galileo. The French want to test nuclear weapons on it. Texaco is applying for the drilling rights.
As a English major (one class short of a useless creative writing minor) that graduated within the past five years, I second Mr. Riddell’s assessment of the situation.
Sean:
But would you have me any other way? Just wait until I start going after journalism majors: there’s a lot of self-loathing that I’ll be processing when I get there.
PROPER NOUNS, MOTHERFUCKER! USE ‘EM, OR I’LL KILL YOU!”
hahah, ok, the post was funny, but this line here… I’ve been there. Done that.
I admit to the typos, especially in blog posts. My fingers sometimes act as if they have their own little brain completely lacking in spelling/word usage skills. I don’t get :my nickers in a not: when I’m reading blog posts and I catch the 1s and 2s. It happens. I’m just as bad at it. However, I’m not consistently bad… I have well thought out, completely correct posts. When I’m seriously writing or writing communications for work - well, then I make sure to slow down, check and recheck.
I read a review of someone today. This reviewer read an ebook. I had doubts about the quality of the ebook before I saw the review. The review couldn’t spell half the words used in the review… and had some crappy syntax which left me confused a few times. She then ended her review by saying the book was “like, the best book ever!” Yeah right. No wonder crappy books circulate. It’s the crappy reader conspiracy or something.
As an English grad with a major in creative writing, can I just say I agree with you?
Too much feelgood arty crap, not enough basics: Plotting. Character. Dialogue. We don’t have to learn anything, no. Let’s just emulate some drippy crap written two hundred years ago because it’s still in print so it must be fantastically worthy.
Not sure about this. I have a friend who was a brilliant mathematician who had read The Hobbit when he was 8. His spelling was atrocious. Many mathematicians have atrocious spelling. Innumeracy, unlike bad spelling, is no bar to publication for a writer of fiction, which means we end up with a pool of writers of fiction who can spell “innumeracy” but go adrift when it come to (say) calculation of probabilities.
The only reason the English-speaking world makes a fetish of good spelling is that it has silly orthography (we might ponder the fact that there’s no way to say “How do you spell that?” in Korean, which has a sensible system). As Queneau once said, the time spent on mastering spelling might more usefully be spent on something else.
Simon, I concur. How much of that “drippy crap” would get published if the copyright hadn’t expired?
Ithaca:
a) The Hobbit is a children’s book. Reading it at 8 is no proof of genius.
b) What difference does it make if mathematicians have atrocious spelling? Are they writing fiction? I’m sure they know how to add and subtract.
c) Mathematics is a terrible counterexample. Mathematicians are simply not permitted to make mistakes. When a flaw was found in Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, it took a year of work to resolve.
d) It makes no sense to argue that poor spelling isn’t important because (some) writers have poor math skills — if indeed that’s what you’re arguing, because your point isn’t clear.
e) English orthography may be complex and “silly” at times, but we’re stuck with it. Remembering how to spell words correctly isn’t that hard. The acceptance of misspellings makes orthography even more complex and silly.
f) Knowing how to spell correctly gives a writer the opportunity to use deliberate misspelling for effect, as Queneau used to do.
f) Queneau was French. As Steve Martin once said, “It’s like they have a different word for everything.”
Merriam-Webster is bungee-corded to my left wrist.
When I started writing, my spelling was awful. Actually, it was as bad as that of an average high-school graduate. Thing is, English is not my first language and I knew I had a problem and made sure I got a native English speaker to read the manuscript before I sent it.
I probably shouldn’t be giving my opinion on the average American cultural level, but I think it’s pathetic that they’re not much better than someone who never had any formal education in English. These people should be kicking my ass at spelling and grammar, and it’s so sad that they aren’t.
Artemisin, thanks for raising the average.
I think it’s pathetic that they’re not much better than someone who never had any formal education in English
Perhaps that’s because they’ve had no formal education in English as well. Certainly not at school.
I have another corollary for you, based on bitter experience:
“A small independent press is so desperate for material it doesn’t matter if my writing, spelling and grammar suck.”
As for illiterate reviewers, you haven’t lived until you’ve waded through one of their works and found, in the last paragraph, “…and the editing was terrible.”
In other words, there IS a “reader conspiracy” not because they aren’t capable of seeing the errors but because they believe they aren’t errors to begin with.
*blink*
You blame the wussification of education on *Republicans*?!
o_O
Joe, I’m not sure where the word ‘Republicans’ features in this article. Is it in this sentence?
Nope, not there.
I stand corrected.
However, I still find the idea that the warlike powers that be were behind the dumbing-down of education impossible to buy into. For myself, I blame the self-esteem movement. War hawks have never struck me as being big on promoting self-esteem.
I’m not sure how seriously you meant that bit, or if you were just throwing it out there, but if you really believe this, and if you can connect the dots for me, in terms of laying out how you came to that conclusion, I’d be fascinated to read it.