“Try and” is fine in speech, because people do tend to say that – but in the body text it should be picked up by a copy editor, even if the author doesn’t know it’s bad grammar!

Dale Elvy’s first book, can’t recall the title now, was good. Original, well writen, well constructed. His second book I couldn’t even get a third of the way through because of the repetition of ‘try and’. Not only is it just plain bad language, but when it pops up several times in one page, it’s enough to drive a person mad.

David Eddings introduced me to fantasy with his Belgariad series, entrenched it with the Malorean and began to annoy me with the Elenium because I began to see the repetition of the characters. All the women had the same personalities and then men were only ever cast from about three different molds. I read everything up to the Redemption of Athalus, couldn’t get passed the same old characters with different names and haven’t read anything of his since.

Cheers, Lisa.

PS, I would have responded to the cat post but I lost my cat of ten years not long ago. It’s still a little bit tender… 🙁