It's fairly rare English prose bothers me - even in pop lit. like this, but Brandon's really bad enough to be seriously distracting. The more his novels became complex and big, the more it stands out as a weakness.

English is the most basic tool of his trade, he should really invest some time to hone his skills. His editors who let it slide are no better. It's getting more and more annoying to see him brush it off as unimportant every time someone mentions this. He hides behind this notion his prose is "invisible". He should realize it's bad enough it's anything but invisible. Not much of the craftsman's pride there, I guess.

The book was full of semantic mistakes. He often gives words a meaning no dictionary recognizes, is sometimes completely way off (using favours in the sense of smells in TGS), transforms nouns into verbs (like deciding that "to game" is an acceptable synonym of "to play", makes full of syntax errors, full of jarring anachronisms (a sandpaper metaphor, medical terms, precise geologic vocabulary given to farmers etc.). His use of pronouns is distracting to the point of annoyance - half the time he uses a pronoun when the context calls for the character's name and the other way around. We often get the pronoun first and later the name in the sentence, eg: "She believed Egwene should do better", in an Egwene POV! In general, he uses names instead of pronouns way too much in POVs for a 3PL context - RJ could go pages without using the name of the POV character after its first mention in a scene.

It's stunning Tor lets stuff like this be published when a simple language polishing pass by a professional reviser would solve this (though the way Brandon himself speaks of his writing, his raw stuff before editing is much worse than this. I guess the editors correct the worst of his grammar and spelling and just give up at some point). They really have lowered their standards. I guess it's worrying that so many younger readers find Brandon's English "just fine".