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Should Writing Style be a Deterrent against Reading a Story?
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I would say that the writing style isn’t a deterrent for me, with the exception of one book. I can’t remember what it was, but it was a little mystery paperback, and I couldn’t get past the first chapter because one of the characters had apparently never heard of pronouns. Another character’s name was repeated so many times in one paragraph, I couldn’t get past it.
~The Burgular
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Very well said, Burglar. Weird grammar things like that, or just poor grammar is one thing I generally can’t get through. Though I don’t necessarily count grammar in a writing style, grammar is something separate for me. There are books whose writing style I dislike, but they have good grammar. Then there are books where I like the writing style even though the grammar may not be spot on. I guess it largely depends on what story is being told.
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I have never thought about it before, but now that you brought the subject up, I think for me the story is the most important too. Of course, the ideal is that I like the style and the story (that’s going to be a favourite author), but if a story is good and I love the characters, I will go with the style even if I don’t really like it.
On the other end, if the style is very nice, but I don’t care about the characters, I won’t read.
Though, I also have to say, often the style affects the way I feel about the characters, so I’m not sure the two things can be separeted. Not completely, at least. The way an author let me know about the characters’ feelings and thoughts, the way he manages to get me involved with them, their predicments, their goals, their failures and their success, depends in part on how that’s rendered by the author’s style. In my opinion.
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You make a good point. While the style isn’t necessarily a deterrent against reading for me if the characters and story are good, the story and style cannot be completely separated. I recently read a book for which I had waited for ten years, and that definitely fit the requirement of having good characters with good stories, and a writing style that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was definitely worth the wait, which is always good.
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