Scott Trimble

Ugh! I am so frustrated. For the last week or so, I’ve been trying to finish reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but I’ve been slowed down tremendously because the the book is absolutely riddled with grammatical errors.

I don’t remember anything like this in the previous Harry Potter books, but what I’ve noticed is that J.K. Rowling repeatedly used commas when she should have used either semi-colons or periods. Every time I run into one of these errors — at least every other page or so — I trip up and lose the momentum I’d had.

Figuring I’m not the only one who has noticed these errors, I did some googling and found at least one blog post on the subject. [By the way, this article also mentions some pronoun errors; I’d noticed them too, but they’re not as common, nor as disruptive, as the comma mistakes.]

This is all particularly frustrating because kids are having enough grammar troubles these days, what with MySpace leet and text-messaging shorthand. This poor role model will only set them back further. What’s going on here? Why is Rowling letting us down?

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