- Joined
- Apr 16, 2011
- Messages
- 122
- Reaction score
- 8
- Location
- Denver, CO
- Website
- thedaoshichronicles.blogspot.com
I just received a reply to a query I sent several months ago, and the agent quoted my original text. This hasn't happened before. In the quoted text, it's clear that either my email client or her email client messed up the formatting.
There are some accented letters, and they don't show up with their diacriticals -- they look like ¬, Ã*, and Ä, with random spaces and hard indents inserted between characters. But even apostrophes and underscores are messed up. "Her father's" will come out as "her father’s" and _Book Title_ will come out as *Book Title*.
In short, I sent a professional query letter, and yet the agent received a letter that looks like it was written by a drooling lunatic.
Do you think this happens often enough that an agent will see it and say "ANSII coding issues" and ignore the problems? Or do you think I need to strip out any possible nonstandard characters ("smart" quotes, for instance)?
There are some accented letters, and they don't show up with their diacriticals -- they look like ¬, Ã*, and Ä, with random spaces and hard indents inserted between characters. But even apostrophes and underscores are messed up. "Her father's" will come out as "her father’s" and _Book Title_ will come out as *Book Title*.
In short, I sent a professional query letter, and yet the agent received a letter that looks like it was written by a drooling lunatic.
Do you think this happens often enough that an agent will see it and say "ANSII coding issues" and ignore the problems? Or do you think I need to strip out any possible nonstandard characters ("smart" quotes, for instance)?
