5 ms·
"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 writi
by 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.
- selven 17y agoIt still has many improvements over C. Compare: void func(x) { if (a == b) { do(c); do(d); } else{ do(e); } } vs: def func(x): if a == b: do(c) do(d) else: do(e)
- coliveira 17y agoI write the first as void func(int x) { if (a==b) do(c),do(d); else do(e); }
- eru 17y agoBecause how are you going to refer to foo (and not the result of foo) otherwise? Haskell has it right. And Scheme and Forth of course.
- assemble 17y agoI have the same problem. I usually find that not only can I remove the parenthesis, but I can often remove the entire phrase. Usually it turns out that they were just extraneous things that I found interesting with no real pertinence to the rest of whatever I am writing.
- jamesbritt 17y ago"Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-)." Use of parens in writing is akin to calling a subroutine in code; you're making something of a detour, but coming right back. As in writing, I found that if a method is getting busy trying to express many different things then I need to break it up.
- kelnos 17y agoSame here. I overuse parenthetical statements like crazy. Once, long ago, I was told that you should only use parenthetical clauses when the sentence will still make sense and give enough information if you were to just delete the clause entirely. So, with that in mind, I'll often just try to delete the parenthetical and move on. If I really care enough about what's between 'em, I'll try to rephrase, maybe by putting it in a new sentence.