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Jun. 26th, 2007 03:05 pmWhat's wrong with quotation marks? I rather like quotation marks. They let you know what's spoken and what's not, and make it clear when the speaker switches. But no, required summer reading authors are above quotation marks.
Just yesterday, I was complaining to my dad about how annoying the historical present is, and how I hate it when Classical authors switch tenses back and forth for no apparent reason, when it's all in the same time. I said something about how I'm glad that in English, this is not commonly accepted, and tense changes are pretty much clear as to why they're there. Thanks for proving me wrong. Now I'm going to have a hard time liking this book (Angela's Ashes) even if it's good. And that, my friends, is why you should not have annoying, persistent little technical things that make the reader want to stab the book regardless of the words, the plot, characters, any of the stuff that should be what matters.
/rant
Edit— I thought of a reason for the lack of quotation marks: it's nonfiction and they're not actually quotes. It's still annoying, though. Maybe I just don't like the memoiry genre, if that's how it is.
Just yesterday, I was complaining to my dad about how annoying the historical present is, and how I hate it when Classical authors switch tenses back and forth for no apparent reason, when it's all in the same time. I said something about how I'm glad that in English, this is not commonly accepted, and tense changes are pretty much clear as to why they're there. Thanks for proving me wrong. Now I'm going to have a hard time liking this book (Angela's Ashes) even if it's good. And that, my friends, is why you should not have annoying, persistent little technical things that make the reader want to stab the book regardless of the words, the plot, characters, any of the stuff that should be what matters.
/rant
Edit— I thought of a reason for the lack of quotation marks: it's nonfiction and they're not actually quotes. It's still annoying, though. Maybe I just don't like the memoiry genre, if that's how it is.
