One question I do have for you–how much of a part does Convention play in a review?

We all know there exists a set of conventions to every genre and even subgenre or subsets of a particular genre. How often does a book’s delivering on those conventions (or not) affect a reader’s like or dislike of the book.

To use an example, if you have a paranormal shapeshifter romance, there exists conventions that fans of PSR have come to expect. There are a number, such as pack or group behavior, actual shifting, some sort of secret society, themes about family life as illustrated by a pack, and a romantic entanglement and its own associated conventions, to name a few. Generally, if a book meets some number of all the expected conventions, it “fits” expectations. But what of a book that is PSR but doesn’t include enough of the conventions? How much does that affect a review-quality look at a story?

I hope I’m making sense, because I really am curious as to how much of a reader’s enjoyment of a story has to do with if they’re getting what they expected, which is more subjective (and may be able to be used to fine-tune promotion efforts and increase customer satisfaction with an end product)

“I seem not to be communicating well myself. Maybe I need more English lessons!”

The native English standard would tend more toward “I don't seem to be”

And my genealogy traces back to the 18th Century in Maryland! I’m relatively native as these things go. (wink)

Thanks for the example, though. I tend to pick up the mannerisms of my characters when I’m writing, and this is one of those occasions.

Example of what you’re looking for right there. “I seem not to be—” The negative after the verb it’s talking about.

The native English standard would tend more toward “I don’t seem to be”

Because these errors are at the foundational level of reading – that is, because they greet the reader at the most basic level of comprehension – they can exacerbate problems some had with other textual elements and other response factors.

I think this is pretty important. When I read, I embrace the author’s “world” completely. If errors like these start popping up, it throws me out of the “world,” and I lose my faith in the author’s storytelling ability. Sort of like, “if I can’t trust you to write a coherent sentence, how can I believe in your story?” For me, they’re not just pesky technical details – they reflect on the author’s authority as a writer.

As a writer this is something I’ve noticed–how a character or pov can feel like it’s from a foreign-born character and you can even “hear the accent” simply because of the author’s skillful sentence structures that mimic that of the character’s native tongue. It’s something I’ve noticed, and so when you mentioned it, Robin, I was quick to notice.

Thank you all!

I tend to be more forgiving of ebooks than I am of paper published books. I cut new authors a lot of slack, and old favorites not so much. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a nitty gritty medieval romance (Roberta Gellis) and if I pick up a lighter one (Garwood or Dodd, for instance whom I also love) I get grumpy at them for not writing like Gellis or Kinsale, which is hardly fair.

For these reasons I seldom say I don’t like a book/author unless I’ve tried it multiple times. (I would not be a great reviewer ). The exception, is, of course, when there are too many “craft” mistakes. Poor research, poor grammar, poor plotting.
Best,
Patty

There is an additional issue when native speakers disagree on proper usage (I know this can drive authors batty when they’re trying to use pieces of a language unfamiliar to them), but I think in most languages there are several valid usages.

@J L Wilson: Thanks. I have an academic background, too, in literature, and I didn’t even break this down until I read the comments on the Blacio review.

@ReacherFan: Thank you for the sports analogy; I had not thought of it, but it’s very useful. Readers talk all the time about how they recognize the technical skill of a book that doesn’t necessarily move them, although I think most readers will favor the “artistic” side of the equation, which makes sense. My own preference in reviewing is to see both sides evaluated, because for me both are important. It took me a good while to understand why Romance readers could give sub-C grades to books that were well-written but not “romantic” to the reader.

But I agree with Robin (er, Janet) 100% about grammatical correctness. My on-line name is from a quote in one of the prefaces written for Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.

I’m paraphrasing here (since I no longer carry Strunk and White in my hip pocket)–White said Strunk used to exhort his students to clear out the swamp of their unclear writing–or at the very least throw the poor reader a rope. So, please, dear authors, at least throw me a rope. If I have to read a paragraph three times to figure out which garden path you’d like to lead me up, I’m out of there.

I’m not a writer, but if you are, I expect you to do a decent job at it. And if you can’t bother to use correct grammar, spell check (for crying out loud), proper punctuation (okay, so I never do, but see above about me not being a writer), etc., then I think it is less than professional. I think the majority of readers who have a literature background would agree. This is the bare minimum.

Edited to add, sorry I saw Ashwinder’s after I finally finished this comment.

imply being a reader rather than a reader/reviewer allows me the freedom of not having to think about my responses to an authors' work.

I can say “I didn't care for it” or “I loved it” and there is no one who will call me onto the carpet for being less eloquent or coherent.

@joanne: I agree; that’s the difference (for me) between reading to review (or study, or teach) a book and reading it just to (hopefully) enjoy it. I think those contexts, review or academic analysis, call for me to analyze my reaction as part of analyzing the book — being objective about my subjective reaction. All my reading could be subject to the same analysis, but I don’t always bother to do so if I’m not trying to explain it to others.

As others have said, when you find a reviewer whose taste mirrors yours, you can trust that person’s recommendations. Moreover, when a reviewer explains her or his reaction in terms of taste, it helps readers judge whether or not they would react the same way. I think there are some readers who, never having taught or reviewed or thought about the books they read in that way, don’t realize that there is that kind of process going on in their reaction. Which is why words like “good” and “bad” get bandied about in discussion, with some people meaning “correct” and “incorrect” and others meaning “to my taste” or “not to my taste.” This often leads to misunderstandings, in my experience.

Since we’re talking about influence of other languages in English books, one typical romance mistake that throws me out of the book often, is if you have your handsome European hero or heroine (I’m not talking about descendants, I do mean actual people from Europe) using their own language for sweet-talking or angry moments AND THEN the author (who obviously is not from that country her/himself) doesn’t use the correct case in the language (having nominative or genitive or dative or even using plural where we would use singular or getting the spelling wrong).

Now, most often I can get back into the story and I know that authors don’t have the money to pay for real Germans (in my case – sometimes I can see French errors, too) checking their manuscript, but at least USE AN ONLINE DICTIONARY!! so we don’t get errors like the fact that all nouns have capital letters in German and your German not using them correctly (e.g. writing “mein liebling” for “my dear/my darling”, not realising that Liebling is a noun in German ).

These days I have lower tolerance for those mistakes, because clearing them up is so easy.

A tip for authors wanting to use German words: LEO English-German Dictionary – this won’t help with the cases but at least with the capital letters.

Oh and while I am talking about the pet names: “My love” in German is not “meine Geliebte” (that’s “my lover”), but something like “meine Liebe/ mein Liebes/ meine Liebste” (and I’m only talking about the female love interest here… you can see the pitfalls).

Il ne me donne jamais rien.

He never gives me anything, but a French speaker might say more literally “He never gives me nothing.”

Probably a better example would be with possessive adjectives. In French possessive adjectives agree with the noun they modify. In English they agree with the person doing the possessing.

So for example you might be talking about a man’s leg. The French word for leg is feminine (sa jambe, whether the jambe belongs to a man or woman), so a French person might erroneously say “her leg” in all instances.

Another common place where sytnax can show a person to be a non-native speaker is in the use of prepositions. Prepositions rarely translate literally from one language to another.

For those of you who do not characterize yourselves as analytical readers, I would argue that there is *always* a logic to how readers respond to books, even if they cannot articulate and discern that logic.

Janet I’m absolutely sure that you’re right about this. My point (obviously not articulated well, lol!) was that simply being a reader rather than a reader/reviewer allows me the freedom of not having to think about my responses to an authors’ work.

I can say “I didn’t care for it” or “I loved it” and there is no one who will call me onto the carpet for being less eloquent or coherent.
For which I am eternally grateful since it seems too much like work.
Without the paycheck.
So thank you (all of you) for the book reviews!

Could you give an example of an English sentence that would reveal to you that its author was French, because of its positioning of a negating word?

A friend pointed out to me that a French girl (in French) would always say “mon papa” (did I get that right), even when addressing her father directly, and in a Tale of Two Cities you see the heroine do that in English, say, “My Papa,” to her father. (Making this up, but, possibly something like, “But, my Papa! You must come with us.”)

If the example were Spanish or Italian, the English might read, “He spat on the grave of his mother,” rather than, “He spat on his mother’s grave,” because there is no possessive in those languages.

So I was just trying to imagine/hear the French example.

Sorry for being a plague!