Punctuation pooh-poohs

[cjsmith]

This? Is not grammatically correct.
Neither? Is this.
It makes prose? Sound whiny and ineffective.
When I do this? Somebody please kick my butt.

Almost every time I see an ellipsis... a comma would be better.
Commas indicate natural pauses in speaking... as this seems to be trying to do.
If it's meant to add emphasis... it's not working.
When I do this... somebody please kick my butt.

Comma splices are another one, each of these should be a sentence, it drives me crazy when I have to read it, I never know if the writer has a point in mind, in fact I usually start to figure they don't, I'm probably guilty of all three of these too sometimes, maybe I should have been a grade-school English teacher, this kind of thing really jumps out at me, when I do this somebody please kick my butt.

I feel better now.

Comments

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

But sometimes? It's just the effect you're looking for. Grammatical correctness is nice, but breaking it occasionally is really useful for stylistic reasons. "Occasionally" is important there; you can take my ellipses away when you pry them from my cold dead keyboard, but they are awfully easy to overuse. These two examples particularly are intended to show how the sentence would be spoken, but listening to someone speak like that all the time would be just as annoying as reading it.

I am totally with you on the comma splices, though.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

"Occasionally" is indeed important. I'm probably guilty of reading too much LiveJournal. I'm filled up to quota on all three of these until at least 2012.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

amen. knowing how to play by the rules is useful; knowing how to break them well is fun :)

Time to Fire up the Ass-Kicking Machine

[psi-star-psi.livejournal.com]

I used to worry about these things...but not so much anymore.

[I'm covering up my head!]

(I apologize for being a contributing source of your pain. I will endeavor to finish rereading The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. I will then finally read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.)

Re: Time to Fire up the Ass-Kicking Machine

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that your internal worrier is still there making sure you write well. :-)

I've never read The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. Is it good?

[hnybny.livejournal.com]

I tend to overuse commas myself, but I hate using short sentences.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I probably overuse colons, semicolons, and parentheses. Sure, they're correct, but I could simplify. I suppose I perceive myself to be writing for an audience with a sophisticated reading comprehension level, so I don't bother simplifying. :-)

[dieppe.livejournal.com]

I... don't... know... what... you are... talking... about!

;) I use them sometimes myself, but in places where a comma would be nice, but the thought that follows doesn't really tie in extremely well with the first thought.

Or something.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

The case where a speaker would just let the words trail off, though, is exactly what it's for! "Um, didn't they... oh wait." I don't know if that usage is perfectly correct, but I know it doesn't bother me.

I also obviously don't mind ending sentences with a preposition. I know Latin couldn't do that. English can. Get over it. :-)

[platypus]

I often write entries, then go back and remove most of the parentheses. It's generally an improvement. I do a lot of copyediting for other people, and I know when I'm writing in a non-standard way, but I often do it anyway in the name of conversational/informal writing. I just try not to let it go too far. I have a friend who uses... ellipses... at almost random points... in sentences... which drives... me... nuts.

I've never noticed any stylistic annoyances in your writing; I think anyone paying enough attention to think about whether they're overdoing it is probably keeping it under control.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

YES! I take out parentheses too! I use parentheses way too much. Perhaps it's reflective of the way I think: full of interconnections and side notes.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Commas indicate natural pauses in speaking... as this seems to be trying to do.

Those are indicating a DRAMATIC pause in speaking, as opposed to a brief one. You have to have some way to differentiate short vs long pauses. That are it.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

*nod* If it were used occasionally, and if it were used where drama made sense in context, I might even still parse it that way. I've reached the point where my eyes skip over the remainder of a post once I see two or three of those.

ps: Oddly enough, I clicked over to your journal for a moment and I found ellipses! I honestly didn't remember them being there. Those did not trip my Oh Noes Someone Is Trying To Make This Sound Like Earth-Shattering Life-Threatening Delivery meter. Now I don't know why some do and some don't. This requires more ponderment.

[psi-star-psi.livejournal.com]

Just for conversation, how would you punctuate a transcript of William Shatner? Use ellipsis, dashes, or (meaningful pause)'s?

I suddenly occurs to me that the Closed Captioning typists must hate his shows. (Or love them because he provides breaks to catch up.)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I would deliberately stray away from grammatical correctness just to preserve the annoyance of the original. In fact, I might mix and match styles. Ellipses between words might suffice for the first few scenes. Sentence fragments containing only one or two words each would up the ante for the next few scenes, followed perhaps by question marks after each word for a while. This could be fun.

[nosrednayduj]

I will occasionally use ellipses in place of a smiley face, when the thing I've said is only marginally amusing. Or, if there's something funnier elsewhere. I try to limit myself to one smiley per message. In that case, though, the ellipses terminate the sentence.

I am also a semicolon (and colon) fiend. They put 'em on my keyboard: I'm gonna USE 'EM.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I overuse smilies in a big way. A couple of years ago, a LiveJournal friend of mine decided to cut herself off cold turkey from any kind of emoticons. She said it was a lot more difficult than she'd expected. I haven't had the guts to try the same.

[juverna.livejournal.com]

You are adorable!

That said, I'm probably going to keep using all of these from time to time -- on LJ, in e-mail, and in IM, at least. It's one of my ways of lovingly saying goodbye to the perfectionist that I was in my youth. :)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

This is one area where my early perfectionism has not abated. I can leave laundry in the dryer and later zap it again for fifteen minutes to get the wrinkles out; I'll eat the too-crispy cookie or the lumpy bread; I am okay with the fact that my hair will never in my entire life look good; but grammar and spelling will probably push my buttons until the day I die. :-)

I wonder what makes a person this way. There are people who clearly are and people who clearly aren't, and I don't know why.

[recordersmith.livejournal.com]

I use parenthesis all the time. I haven't figured out another way to put in information that I want to have as part of the sentence, but I want to be separate from the content of the sentence itself, which I dont want as a new thought after I finish the sentence.

I also tend to write as I would speak, and I definitely dont speak gramatically. I do much more of a stream of consciousness approach.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I haven't figured out a good way to do that either. Sometimes I go back and eliminate the related information entirely; sometimes I find a way to work it in; sometimes I just leave the parentheses.

I write as I would speak, too. My ungrammatical speech is full of sentence fragments. And I start sentences with conjunctions. One habit I haven't picked up, though, is putting a question mark in the middle of a thought! :-)

[airporter.livejournal.com]

I'm a bear about use of the ellipsis. After all, it's supposed to denote words that are missing from a statement. It's a pause, yes, but a very specific one: if you can't imagine another phrase or trailing words where that little trifecta of periods resides, it's not the right spot for the trifecta in the first place.

I'm a dasher myself. And of course, a bracer. I can't help it at all. I'm also occasionally guilty of the "my sentences are too short syndrome," at least when I'm short of time. Then again, when one of my personal peeves is hit at it's core, I tend to ramble.

Just ask allanh about the ellipse and I.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I probably use dashes not only way too often but incorrectly. Some day I'll learn how to do them right. Today is probably not that day.

A bracer? Do you mean you put square brackets around ellipses in quoted material? I definitely do that. I'm almost a little peeved that it seems to be optional rather than required. It makes the point that I'm the one who omitted the missing words, not the original speaker.

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

Harumph.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

And all you kids get off my lawn!

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Bite me.Bless your heart! (http://porcinea.livejournal.com/327744.html)

(*falls over laughing*)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

*wry smile* It's embarrassing when I don't know who does these things, so I don't know who might be offended when I post grammar peeves! :-)

[ken_r]

I do it too, and I also find it annoying (sometimes), and yet....

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[wooddragon.livejournal.com]

I love ellipses in my email... :)

[hanov3r.livejournal.com]

I absolutely overuse commas. I blame it on my early reading; when your primary introduction to punctuation is early 20th century writings (I was raised on very early editions of the Bobbsey Twins [first published in 1904], the Hardy Boys [1927], and Tom Swift [1910... although the majority of those that I read come from the 1950s], among other things), you find that commas come easily. I'm fairly certain that during the Second World War, the government declared a comma shortage which has never been rescinded.

Regarding excessive "quotation marks", somewhere I have a phonecam picture of a sign on a jukebox at a diner near my old place in Virginia that proudly proclaimed it "An 'Authentic' 50s Jukebox".

[mbumby.livejournal.com]

I know I way overuse the ellipsis. Also the dash (or is that double-dash)? I'm only starting to become more familiar with the use of the semicolon (which probably belongs in most of the places I dash).

[zipperbear]

I think it's perfectly OK to append a question mark (usually in parentheses) to indicate uncertainty in numbers, names, spelling, etc.:

3(?) hours earlier, with your friend Sharmaine(?) ...

I'm a big comma addict. Sometimes I decide to split a sentence into several paragraphs, and other times (like here) I need parentheses to clarify the nesting of subordinate clauses. I also tend to use dashes and semicolons to juxtapose related ideas, without specifying the relationship between them.

Speaking of juxtaposition -- Two of my limericks are apropos:

Ralph Nader filed suit against Purgo-Whisk,
Alleging their enema pumps were too brisk.
Said he: It shot holes in
The walls o' my colon;
That's far too much ass to risk.*

*The footnote is the related limerick:

The Purgo-Whisk Corp. of New York
Made douches which had too much torque.
Said one inside source,
Off the record, of course,
You'd be better off using a fork.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I agree with your use of the question mark, and I am very amused by the juxtaposition of "ass to risk" and the *!

[firecat]

The question marks? They bug me too.

And I am also not used to, certain ways that commas are used nowadays.

But when I have those reactions I feel old.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I feel old too. This leads me to wonder: does every generation seem careless and a little stupid to the preceding generations?

[the-fantum.livejournal.com]

I feel .. properly chastened, but! this will not stop me from making my online language as colorful as my "realspeak" (this is conversation, not writing! ;O)