An LLM-written line if I’ve ever seen one. Looks like the authors have their own brainrot to contend with.
Totally agree. What the fuck did Nabokov, Joyce and Dickinson know about language. /s
No, but someone arguing an entire punctuation is “terrible” and “look[s] awful and destroy[s] coherency of writing” sort of has to contend with the great writers who disagreed.
(A great writer is more authoritative than rando vibes.)
> don't think anyone makes a point of you have to read Dickinson in the original font that she wrote in
Not how reading works?
The comparison is between a simplified English summary of a novel and the novel itself.
A great author is equivalent to rando vibes when it comes to what writing looks like, they aren't typesetting experts. I have a shelf of work by great authors (more than one, to be fair) and there are few hints on that shelf of what the text they actually wrote was intended to look like. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if several of them were dictated and typed by someone else completely with the mechanics of the typewriter determining some of the choices.
Shakespeare seems to have invented half the language and the man apparently couldn't even spell his own name. Now arguably he wasn't primarily a writer [0], but it is very strong evidence that there isn't a strong link between being amazing at English and technical execution of writing. That is what editors, publishers and pedants are for.
[0] Wiki disagrees though - "widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare