"I've warned my publishers that if they later on so much as change a single comma in one of my books, they will never see another word from me. Never! Ever!
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When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send along the 'enormous crocodile' to gobble them up."
I have had a similar experience but I don't blame the internet. I blame my age and a growth of my own critical thinking. It used to be that anything an authority told me was "great writing" was great writing. This of course included a wide array of 18th and 19th century writing. But as I've read more I've come to the conclusion that while writing of that era is full of many woderful plots, observations, philosophies, etc, it mostly is not great writing. And a good portion of the ideas illuminated in that writing have been better presented in later writing. So I have a develop an extreme intolerance for 1) naval gazing in writing and 2) complexity. Your thoughts can be complex. Your use of the comma however should not be.
This is not an intolerance for complex ideas or difficult subjects. It is the same reaction I have to a set of bad instructions. That is to thrust them away and try for myself or find another source.
Edit: A little more succinctly, I trust authors less. I have less faith that because you've published a book you have something worth saying. I believe less that wrangling with your abstruse language will yield a reward worth struggling for. So when I encounter difficulty, I discard the coconut and seek an orange.
To paraphrase one of my favorite quotes (from the guy who developed Comic Sans):
If you really love the Oxford Comma you don't know much about writing and need a new hobby. If you really hate the Oxford Comma you don't know much about writing and need a new hobby.
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When I am gone, if that happens, then I’ll wish mighty Thor knocks very hard on their heads with his Mjolnir. Or I will send along the 'enormous crocodile' to gobble them up."
-- Roald Dahl, 1982
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