Silly the Scarecrow

So a funny thing happened - I kind of forgot that I blogged, Ah well, I am back and we shall see if it sticks this time.

The specific reason I am back is a nasty book called Silly the Scarecrow by J.H Willis, JR. I have seen this author spamming quite a few message boards - in my opinion, a sure sign that their book has little chance of succeeding on any of the ways I deem acceptable (reviews, hand selling, quality in general) so I decided to check it out. And, wow, was I right. And if this is right, then I only wanna be wrong. This is a simply awful little book.

I confess to only reading the "sample" pages, but they are so tragically flawed that I can safely say the rest of the book would be equally horrid. Okay, I know grammar is hard - there are so many rules! I myself often need a sanity check from my lovely significant other to ensure that I haven't let slip a tense error or a misplaced modifier. Yet this is beyond those kinds of errors. The wording in this book is just flat out wrong. On the very first page, there is a sentence fragment. Never a good way to start things.

But on the second page, things get downright weird. The word use is so flawed as to be bizarre, and although the thought that English might not be the author's first language crossed my mind, I decided that is *not* an excuse, as a good read through by a writing group (or a college student, or a high school student) would catch these errors. For instance how can a path be "discarded" - did the author mean deserted, or perhaps abandoned? What exactly does the author mean by "social attire? Cloths? Manners? Social class? Huh? Was the word "wondering" meant to be "wandering"? Not only are these word choices annoying and overly pretentious but there is a really egregious comma splice that made me squint with pain. I spent way too much time trying to decode this page.


I am also turned off by the way that this book is marketing itself. It professes itself as an educational text. The book comes with a "great instructional assessment at the end of the book" and "great vocabulary building" exercises. Yuck.  Every child wants to learn in the context of a stinky, overly didactic book that misused most of the words it professes to teach.

The good news is that I still found Silly the Scarecrow educational. Just not in the way that the author meant.