Ohh, no worries about late nights - in fact that real dud of a comment suffered because rather than stay up and think about it, I stumbled into my flat from four hours of supervising hyper teenage boys, blurrily read your comment, went 'oooh *keyboard smash* *thunk*' and passed out with little time for thinking. I suck.
Sadly, the bad-writing bits (Rowlings, not mine this time) are things I have sorta-kinda come to accept as a consequence of reading these books - as much as I think she's a genius of a storytelling and an incredible plotsmith (is that a word? it is now!), her style has never been spectacular, and her writing was even somewhat plodding the first few books (as in multiple books opening with some variation on 'Harry Potter was a very unusual boy in many different ways', ick). She has improved considerably, become a lot more selective with her adjectives especially, but I don't think she'll ever be a truly brilliant wordsmith, and those odd cringing moments are something of a hangover of that, in my mind.
So yeah, while I do in fact have a couple teenage boys in my class who would say things like "You know full well..." (or in the case I'm thinking of, "I do say, Miss, don't you rather think that these new trousers are just delightful?"), it is universally understood that such speech out of a teenage boy is downright eccentric, and in Harry's case not quite on. Snape's melodrama I can take with a grain of salt, if only because he is a bit of an ostentatious drama queen, lol, and thus it fits his character (strangely, the fact that he's a bit over the top doesn't bother me so much, as I tend to read it as more of a defense mechanism on his part, like a deliberate performance to keep people at a safe distance). But at the end of the day, my respect for Rowling is as an inventive and compelling plot-driven storyteller, not as a stylist. Ah, well.
Re: another great reply! (I'm enjoying this):
Sadly, the bad-writing bits (Rowlings, not mine this time) are things I have sorta-kinda come to accept as a consequence of reading these books - as much as I think she's a genius of a storytelling and an incredible plotsmith (is that a word? it is now!), her style has never been spectacular, and her writing was even somewhat plodding the first few books (as in multiple books opening with some variation on 'Harry Potter was a very unusual boy in many different ways', ick). She has improved considerably, become a lot more selective with her adjectives especially, but I don't think she'll ever be a truly brilliant wordsmith, and those odd cringing moments are something of a hangover of that, in my mind.
So yeah, while I do in fact have a couple teenage boys in my class who would say things like "You know full well..." (or in the case I'm thinking of, "I do say, Miss, don't you rather think that these new trousers are just delightful?"), it is universally understood that such speech out of a teenage boy is downright eccentric, and in Harry's case not quite on. Snape's melodrama I can take with a grain of salt, if only because he is a bit of an ostentatious drama queen, lol, and thus it fits his character (strangely, the fact that he's a bit over the top doesn't bother me so much, as I tend to read it as more of a defense mechanism on his part, like a deliberate performance to keep people at a safe distance). But at the end of the day, my respect for Rowling is as an inventive and compelling plot-driven storyteller, not as a stylist. Ah, well.