Sorry. I started to rant there. That wasn't the point of this post... I love writers. I honestly think they have accomplished something amazing if they manage to complete something and get it to a point that they want others to see it. It is something I could never do.
What I was trying to say was that I often feel like I am a bad person for caring about grammar, spelling, or story development. I don't expect anyone to share my enamoured view of character and plot tropes or my vehemence about the Oxford comma. But I don't want to feel ashamed of any of that either.
In an age of text speak and emojis, have I become a dinosaur purely because of my love of the language that has been somewhat overtaken by 'convenience'? Does my refusal to use numbers within words or remove all the vowels constitute a terminal disease? And as far as prospective authors go, am I smothering the creative genius that is distinguishing the good guys in a novel from the bad ones by the capital vowels used (or not) when referring to "ThEm" or "Them" if I refuse to accept that as a valid construct? If I prefer the sentence itself to make it clear?
When did wanting the quality of the story and the clarity of good prose to be the only champions a writer needed become a bad thing? Or have we become the old Vaudeville adage from Gypsy- "You gotta get a gimmick"? I certainly hope not.
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