What Readers Hate Most in Books

[mainer]

Readers seem to be a persnickety and easily irritated bunch.

A few weeks ago, I asked readers of our Book Club newsletter to describe the things that most annoy them in books.
The responses were a tsunami of bile. Apparently, book lovers have been storing up their pet peeves in the cellar for years, just waiting for someone to ask. ..
Dreams, in fact, are a primary irritation for a number of readers. Such reverie might have worked for Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” or Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but no more, thank you very much. “I absolutely hate dream sequences,” writes Michael Ream. “They are always SO LITERAL,” Jennifer Gaffney adds, “usually an example of lazy writing.”
(snip)
Sharp-eyed readers are particularly exasperated by typos and grammatical errors. Patricia Tannian, a retired copy editor, writes, “It seems that few authors can spell ‘minuscule’ or know the difference between ‘flout’ and ‘flaunt.’” Katherine A. Powers, Book World’s audiobook reviewer, laments that so many “authors don’t know the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay.’”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/02/08/book-pet-peeves/

[CrispyQ]

1. Sentence fragments.

I've stopped reading books due to the number of sentence fragments. I don't mind an occasional fragment, to make a point, but when there are fragments throughout the manuscript it's jarring. Other grammatical errors, especially using the incorrect word, also bother me. I'm also not a big fan of present tense writing. The problem with dreams is that you know what's happening isn't really happening to the character.

[vanlassie]

6. Oh dear, I thought you really stopped reading books!

😉

[old as dirt]

10. How do you feel about magical realism?

The problem with dreams is that you know what's happening isn't really happening to the character.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

15. Not a fan

Real life can be weird enough without resorting to the supernatural.

Love the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but the magical realism grows tiresome after a while.

[Jerry2144]

2. My biggest pet peeve are those writers

Who don’t know the difference between etymology and entomology. Those writers bug me in ways that words cannot describe

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

14. LOL

What you did there, I see it.

[AZSkiffyGeek]

3. I had a class in college where the professor offered an automatic A to anyone who spotted a typo

One person got the A when we were reading Virgin Suicides.

But these complaints seem pretty petty.

[mainer]

4. From a proofreading standpoint, it's so easy to miss typos

I've read and re-read a manuscript and STILL missed typos. Our brains automatically fill in missing letters or words because it's focused on meaning, and if it can grasp the meaning of a sentence, despite a missing word, it just moves right on past it. Think about how often in our daily lives we write an email or a text without noticing a typo. Imagine how easy it is do with a 100,000-word manuscript.

Spellcheck doesn't help when an entire word is missing, or you've written a homonym instead.

[Cartoonist]

5. Is that a homonymphobia?

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

13. As a former editor for an online publication

Spell check was only a quick look-see for the obvious. It was my first scan. It was not my last.

My favorite go-to tricks to spot errors were 1) going through the manuscript backward, word by word, and 2) reading it aloud.

The going backwards part is the toughest, because it's slow going, plus you need to know homonyms/homophones, inside out. I wouldn't stop to read forward again for the sound-alike words--I'd only mark them with a red circle, to come back to on a second read-through, usually my read aloud run. But I always noted them.

Still, the going backward part "forces" your brain to look for spelling errors, and to see things like words that are in a sentence multiple times, which are typical signs of a revision/cut and paste error. As an example, If you see "words some typed phrase a typed," ("typed a phrase typed some words" when read forward) then you know someone reworded something or cut and paste and failed to get rid of a previous wording.

Reading aloud is also slow going, but it can catch similar errors that the backwards scan couldn't catch (like your missing word example).

Its more useful function is finding outright awful wording. Some writers can't "hear" dialogue in their heads the way people say it. By reading things aloud, you get rid of wording that makes no sense, or that is too clumsy and clunky. You want all of a manuscript, not merely the dialogue, to have the "flow" found in speaking the language itself. Some things just "sound right" to our ear (and our mental ear, too), while other phrasing with the same meaning never does.

So those were my "simple tricks" to proofread a doc. Worked like a charm for me, but YMMV.

[Paper Roses]

7. I am disturbed when I read a book where so many of the characters names are too seminar.

Too many of the characters names begin with the same letter. It it tends to confuse me. I find that I frequently have to go back and find the characters so that I remember their place in the story.
Ben, Bob, Jane and Joan, you get my idea. With millions of names available, it would certainly be easy to give the characters names that are not similar.

[Basic LA]

8. Animals in the wrong place.

Like penguins in Iceland! This was somewhat prominent in a classic I read recently: What Makes Sammy Run, from 1941.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

16. Anything I know not to be so pulls me right out of a book

Doesn't matter if it's penguins in Iceland or characters grooving to a song before it came out. Those are ridiculous errors that take almost no time to weed out with careful research.

[SheltieLover]

9. Details unrelated to story.

I don't need to know a character bent over to tie their shoes or what color their shoes are, unless those details move the story forward.

[old as dirt]

11. Many lay persons don't know the definition of a Lie Group.

Katherine A. Powers, Book World’s audiobook reviewer, laments that so many “authors don’t know the difference between ‘lie’ and ‘lay.’”

Lie Group: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_group

Sorry… couldn’t resist.

[getting old in mke]

12. Behold the manifold jokes of the mathematician :)

Although maybe its a Lay group if it's a codomain.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

17. My pet peeves can be summed up with

George Orwell's, "Politics and the English Language" no-nos:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Note: This would actually be my #1 pet peeve, if I wrote the list. I can't stand writers who use big words for the sake of using big words, as if their ability to navigate a thesaurus would impress anyone.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Note: This is my #2 pet peeve. Passive voice is lazy writing, boring and something I associate with manipulative people. Hate it, with a passion.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

When my college classmates would ask for my secret to getting high As on writing assignments, I always told them to read the Orwell essay, and then follow its advice, anytime they put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).

That one short essay will make anyone a better writer.