The Harry Potter books are full of: - Tom Swifties (so named because of people dunking on the cheesy old Tom Swift adventure stories), where every "he said/she said" line has a colorful verb + adverb "I have PTSD and everyone treats it as a joke," Neville whined nebbishly
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- "Eye-dialect", where you conve that someone speaks English in an accent different from your own by mangling the spelling of their words like an asshole "Ach, jus' becau' a Scots dialec' is charact'riz'd bah glo'al stops don' mean yer hafta cover m'dialogue w'apostrophes"
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"Emotional punctuation", where you grossly overuse and/or misuse punctuation marks, italics, capitalization, etc. "Harry was... so upset... he couldn't even... get through a whole sentence... even when... he wasn't talking... and it was just... the third-person narration"
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And look Lengthy monologuing isn't inherently a bad thing, there are writers who build their whole style around making that concept work But the *massive* character filibusters she has people break into as soon as she's allowed are the kind of thing editors mock all the time
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Fuck's sake her new book Troubled Blood ends with the murderer giving a THIRTY-PAGE-LONG CONFESSION of all their crimes Just sitting there answering all the detective's questions in exhaustive detail to make sure all the plot holes are patched up
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adverbs are a helluva drug
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Yikes.
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a good friend of mine skipped the potter books entirely when they came out, and only cranked through them when very bored on a summer break from college he said it was like reading tv, which is still about the most apt descriptor i've ever come across
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That reviewer who panned Troubled Blood who said the reason Rowling avoids describing any other fantasy authors as her "literary influences" because her biggest influence is obviously having spent hours watching daytime soaps was on point
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One of the things that struck me about the HP books is that although they were adequate reads they were like cotton candy--not much actual substance, puffed up into a large volume.
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Compare to Heinlein's _Double Star_, a short novel that (though of similar weight) is far more tightly written. RAH does in two pages (or less!) what would take JKR a chapter.
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