8 ms·

what i've always wondered is how to handle apostrophes, parentheses and punctuation. it's not what is Right, it's what will look right to the audience. i love

• RevRal 17y ago
  If you're serious, which is likely since the internet is worldwide, I have some advice that can help you get started. Also, I'm going to believe that your lack of capitals is a conscious choice. A method of saving time... over time. Besides apostrophes, commas, and question marks, I have always considered special punctuation as a kind of cheat. If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought. One exercise I have employed, when organizing my writing, has been to write without punctuation and in lines, every thought on a new line. Like a poem. Punctuation is essentially there to separate these thoughts, so you can start by adding the periods, then arranging your thoughts into a paragraph. Use of special punctuation, in my opinion, is mostly a means of controlling rhythm. And the ability to ease into the rhythm of writing is largely dependent on a reader's, or writer's, familiarity with the language. So, I would focus on periods and commas first, until you have a good familiarity with the language. That is my advice to you.
  • etfb 17y ago
    "If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought." Thank you. You've just fixed my writing style. I owe you a large drink. (No, seriously. I use semi-colons, colons and em-dashes -- pretentious and pedantic though they be; fun though it be to be better educated than my audience -- entirely too often: see? With the above quotation in my arsenal, I shall cease forthwith. Consider me indebted to you for any clarity I may thus gain.)
    • gjm11 17y ago
      Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, and adopted a rule that every time I notice myself writing parentheses I stop and consider (1) whether I can just delete them or replace them with commas and (2) whether I can get rid of them in some other way. I find that maybe 90% of the time this leads to an improvement. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the same applies to other relatively unusual kinds of punctuation. Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought". Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-).
      • nfnaaron 17y ago
        "Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, ... (1) ... (2) ..." When I try to eliminate parentheses and similar parentheticals, I write separate sentences if possible.
        • gjm11 17y ago
          Ho ho. Entirely different sort of parentheses, of course. But yes, the sentence might have been improved by splitting it up so that it didn't need numbering. [EDITED after looking again at what I wrote before, to add:] Or just by removing the numbers.
          • nfnaaron 17y ago
            Oh ... Sorry, but I was absolutely not critiquing your sentence. I specifically was not objecting to your use of parenthesized numbering. I was trying to jump off from your solution to reducing parentheses, to say how I handle the same problem. In an informal setting like this, I see no problem at all with casual or bumpy grammar. My apologies, I should have included the text of your points in the quote.
      • RevRal 17y ago
        Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought" Which is fitting, since I consider the use of special punctuation a cheat. I don't hold myself above cheating all the time, and I did cheat. It helps to save time, since a single paragraph can be refined endlessly. You have to have flexible standards.
  • DannoHung 17y ago
    Aw, but I love the semicolon; it let's you do CRAZY things!
• boredguy8 17y ago
  Many standard rules for punctuation are actually merely the outcome of a need for movable type printing presses to save money and are incoherent in 2009. For instance, standard punctuation would have me write: Please append the extension ".txt." For clarity, I'd re-write: Please append the extension ".txt" to the file. Much of this comes from the notion that punctuation resides insides the quote marks. But the rule comes from a practice fueled by function: the period and comma were the two most breakable tiles for printers, and having them inside another tile meant they were far less likely to break. I increasingly find myself quoting text exactly, and I place punctuation not in the original outside the quotation. But I also use "they" as a first person singular gender-neutral pronoun: I don't know the author of that article, but they certainly did a good job. I guess I'm a grammatical progressive.
  • jacobolus 17y ago
    More reasonably: if you were typesetting something carefully, you’d stack the ” close to directly above the . and you’d use a separate typeface or color to set a precise computer string such as `.txt`. In plain text communications, I tend to avoid situations where a string like « ".txt". » might come up, because it’s confusing no matter which side of the quotation marks the period ends up on, and instead use some punctuation like «.txt» or `.txt` to make clear that this is a technical word whose precise character arrangement matters, especially since the " character is itself often meaningful in such strings.