I think I may have seen something in /r/whatsthatbook more baffling than

[conuly]

"It's set in a time when things were hard for black people in America" - a line which so flabbergasted me that I don't think I ever figured out what to say.

But this one may have topped it!

"The story is about a black girl, somewhere between 8 and 16 years old, from a black family."

...I'm dying to ask why they think they need to specify that this girl is the same race as everybody else in her family, when that's usually how this works. There's no indication in the rest of the post that we might have reason to think she's not.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Well, she could've been adopted. But yeah....

[oursin]

Or she could have been a genetic surprise in a passing family, perhaps. But yup, duh.

[minoanmiss]

Lolsob

[ethelmay]

Part of what happens when one writes badly is ending up saying illogical things like this (though the kind of illogical things one ens up saying also often reveals biases). The person may have meant something like "and there's a lot about her family, too," and trying to sum up the general impression of the family landed on repeating the word "black." Does that make sense?

[conuly]

Oh, yeah. Though judging from the rest of the post I think they're just very bad at composition.

There are posters like that occasionally, whose writing is so bad that I actually think they're not totally literate. It's not that they use nonstandard language or that they don't know how to spell or punctuate - though that's also often the case - but their writing is so jumbled that it's nearly impossible to make sense of. I honestly don't know how they got into the world so far behind.

[halfshellvenus]

Plus, somewhere between 8 and 16 years old? There are, like, 4-5 developmental stages across that range. Doesn't the author know how old their character is?

[conuly]

Oh, no, people are frequently unclear on why they need to specify whether a book they read "as a kid" was read when they were 5 or when they were 15.

[kareina]

The second one just reads to me like someone started typing a sentence, got interrupted, then finished the sentence, making certain to include the information they meant to include, without going back to see if it was already there.

[sallymn]

Ummm, this sounds like one of those customers people talk about on the Not Always Right website!

Really narrowing this down, too.