Professor Kathryn Sutherland (who teaches at Oxford University) recently studied over 1,000 original handwritten pages of Jane Austen’s writing and discovered the author was a poor speller, often misused punctuation, and committed a wealth of other “sins” that earn a beginning writer rejection letters from publishers. (For more about Austen’s writing problems, visit NPR.)

Of course this raises a question: Is there something wrong with current publishing practices if someone like Jane Austen couldn’t get past the gatekeeper at any of the presses that now reprint and sell her novels?

And how many other Jane Austens are there out there right now who’ll never see their stories published because they fail to employ the right form of “their” in a sentence or use too many exclamation marks?

The solution for the writer is to hire someone to pre-edit their work. But one still has to wonder if perhaps publishing houses are looking at the wrong things when deciding whether or not an author’s story has any merit.

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When not brow-beating publishing houses, Duncan Long is a freelance magazine and book illustrator for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See his book illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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