A note to a special reader

Dear Mr. Dan Brown,

I would first like to thank you for your continued interest in The Recipe. The Editorial Board wants you to know that we appreciate every one of our readers, and try to do our best to provide stories that are as cosmopolitan and as interesting as they are.

Thanks to outcries from conservative Christians as well as copyright lawyers, your international best-seller The DaVinci Code has dominated headlines lately. The release of the film version, starring America's everyman, has done little to quell the world's fascination with the novel. In an effort to either jump on the bandwagon, get with the crowd, or keep up with the Jones' (please pick your favorite cliche), I recently took three days out of my life to read your book. While I don't claim to be a literary scholar, I would like to offer to you my comments for any upcoming editions or sequels.

To begin, I suggest that you walk down to your nearest community college and enroll in a Basic Composition course. If you tell your publisher that it is a business expense, I am sure they would be more than happy to pay for it. It is in your interest to do this, as I have never read the works of a native speaker that has a poorer command of the written English language than yourself. For a man that is not mentally deficient, you, quite simply, have embarassingly poor word choice. For example, you cannot use the word incredulous to describe every emotion that your characters have in the story. Incredulous means incredulous. It does not mean skeptical, disbelieving, or confused, and just because you find a given word listed as a synonym in a thesaurus, it does not mean that it is a suitable replacement.

A basic composition course will also teach you the basic definition of a sentence. You see, at the very minimum a sentence must include both a subject and a verb, and, if you choose, a complement of some sort. Sentences that do not include a subject doing a specified action are known as incomplete sentences, and are generally frowned upon on every level of writing.

Despite what you may think, writing a particular sentence or clause in either bold or italics does not make it more powerful. In fact, it annoys the reader, leaves him searching for the title of a publication or film, and wondering why the author couldn't have reworked it into a better sentence instead of relying on cosmetic tools.

I also suggest that the next time you write a novel that takes place in Europe, you make a better attempt at getting the details right. While the unit of currency in many European countries is the euro, the plural of 'euro' is 'euros'. You have one euro, you have ten euros. It is not the same as the word 'sheep', where the singular and plural forms are the same. In a French accent 'euros' may sound like 'euro', but it is still spelled 'euros', and to leave off the last s shows that you have never seen the plural form of this word in a sentence that you yourself did not write.

Additionally, it does not make sense that the French would have a prison in Andorra (as you claim), when Andorra is a separate nation. Andorra may be small, but nevertheless independent, and I'm sure they have no desire in taking up the burden of France's prisoner population. And finally, while some Englishmen may take their earl grey tea with lemon, this is but a small fringe of the population. In real life, if an aristocratic Englishman were to ask a lowly Harvard pofessor how the former took his tea, the answer would most assuredly be 'with milk.'

I hope that these comments are constructive, and that you will consider implementing them in the future,

Yours truly,

Mr Beerman
New York Correspondent, The Recipe