A proofreader with a passion for Virginia ancestry.

I’d been looking forward to reading the short biography. Looking forward to learning about this person. So last night I finally read it. Well, I read about twenty pages, skimmed through the rest, and am very disappointed, because I still do not know very much about this man. Not because I skimmed so much but because at page twenty I had suddenly been hit with the indisputable fact that I was not going to be able to trust the author’s research and, hence, conclusions.* That realization certainly encouraged me to skim only, but my main motivation for not reading the book carefully was the quality—or more specifically, the lack thereof—of the writing.

The book was unorganized, repetitious (repeatedly!), frequently lacking in logic, employed too much passive voice (a little is almost inevitable, but this was too much), inconsistent, wordy, full of sloppy grammar, and greatly in need of proofreading (the sentence with the two verbs told me that). I don’t hold the author at fault for the problems mentioned in the last paragraph. I do, however, hold the author at fault for not getting the book edited and proofread. The author is a professor. Of English. Perhaps she felt that qualified her as a writer above a need for editing. But there really isn’t such a thing. Every author needs his/her work edited and/or proofread.

*In case you are interested in what was on page twenty that raised a red flag, not to mention the fireworks coming from me: The author had been providing information on the apparent ancestry of the subject and building an argument for a certain family connection based first on the family stories [hearsay] of one elderly lady and then on a colonial tax record, which according to the author said a certain thing. The combination of the hearsay evidence and what the official record supposedly said added up to genealogical information that was at least worth considering. But then I turned the page and there on page twenty was the image of the transcript of the tax record, which very clearly said something entirely different from what the author thought it said. What the author thought named two children of the taxpayer was actually giving the names of the two slaves the [free black] taxpayer owned.)