6 ms·
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
by 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 agoSome 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 agoHo 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 agoOh ... 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 agoRemark 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.
- selven 17y ago"Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-)." This is why everyone should learn Python.
- dazmax 17y agoWhat? Python has way too many parentheses. Why should I have to write foo() to call foo? That's what I want to do with it 99% of the time. Ruby has it right.
- DannoHung 17y agoAw, but I love the semicolon; it let's you do CRAZY things!