Too much knowledge is a bad thing

I’ve ruined another reader.

I didn’t plan on it. It really wasn’t intentional. I plead not guilty, even though I am. I turned my own mother into an EDITOR.

{hangs head in shame} I apologize to all you authors out there whose books my mother would have happily read without complaint. Now she’s nitpicking punctuation and it’s all my fault.

After a spirited discussion not long ago over dinner, in which Ursula took over my body and began ranting about the misuse of punctuation – the abundance of ellipses, the use of semi-colons in place of commas, the unmitigated rain of exclamation points – my mother started to analyze the books she reads.

Now she finds the misuse of punctuation as irritating as Ursula does. And she yelled at me about it.

My mother is an avid reader. [That’s where I got it from.] She buys TONS of books, most by mail order, so her postal carrier tends to glare at her house when he walks by. She reads and reads and reads. And she enjoys the vast majority of these books. She reads for the story, so up until now, the words have faded into the background for her. Then Ursula got a hold of her and bent her year about bad grammar and now she notices things wrong with the books she reads, and I get blamed for it. I would yell at Ursula, but she’s busy editing right now and she might hurt me, so I’ll just have to keep quiet about it for now.

Does your inner editor make it hard for you to enjoy reading? And is it Ursula’s fault?