It keeps happening to me that I disagree with the placement of commas in sentences in new books. This happens so often that I am starting to wonder if I am at fault. Reading the first paragraphs of ARCs, I will mentally reconnect a sentence with a comma that has been rendered as two sentences, and mentally split sentences that should have been split but which were not. There was a time when I would stop reading a book entirely if this happened, but I’m trying to be more charitable and do less of that, hence the mental editing.

This almost never happens to me when I am reading older books, and I wonder if it has to do with something new going on in language, or if it’s that these newer books have yet to be sorted by time, wheat from chaff, so to speak.