Hard Stops, Grammar [stet], and Cursive - Communication

[Fudge Nuggets 19455]

15 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Oxford comma ride or die. 

Double sentence spacing just reflects an unwillingness to adapt to the modern world. 

Single spacing is a sign of laziness.

[Anastasis 23717]

3 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Single spacing is a sign of laziness.

[El Diablo 4232]

3 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Single spacing is a sign of laziness.

Single spacers are the folks who will fuck you in the ass and not have the courtesy to give a reach around.

[Mole 4339]

12 hours ago, Pancho said:

It’s the evolution that @Spaulding Smails is talking about.  It’s become mor acceptable to be less formal in writing. If one teacher/professor allows it, they assume all of us/them do.  I sure as fuck do not. 

The problem is, when I grade a college student’s written work and see nothing but semi-colons when there should be commas or periods, it gets them major points deducted because errors like that shouldn’t be happening at this level. 

 

1. I love semicolons; they’re very powerful tools.

2. I don’t mark off for terrible grammar so much as make them resubmit until it doesn’t suck. Time is a powerful motivator. Measure twice, cut once.

3. I’m on team single space after a period. Likewise, I don’t lament the decline of calligraphy or complain that reading and writing is killing oral traditions. A flexible mind can adapt to better ways of communicating. 

4. Effective communication should reflect its mode. Academic writing should be pedantic and indecipherable; emails should be clear and passive aggressive; texts should maximize efficiency and gifs.

[Rougarou 594]

2 hours ago, Mole said:

1. I love semicolons; they’re very powerful tools.

2. I don’t mark off for terrible grammar so much as make them resubmit until it doesn’t suck. Time is a powerful motivator. Measure twice, cut once.

3. I’m on team single space after a period. Likewise, I don’t lament the decline of calligraphy or complain that reading and writing is killing oral traditions. A flexible mind can adapt to better ways of communicating. 

4. Effective communication should reflect its mode. Academic writing should be pedantic and indecipherable; emails should be clear and passive aggressive; texts should maximize efficiency and gifs.

I'm team single space and we seem to be the PC generation as the type writer mandated the two spaces.

I matriculated in a creative writing program which, anyone familiar knows, is full of poor grammar and an over-reliance on editors to whip punctuation/grammar into shape without losing the punch of the ideas and stories created. In that world the semicolon is taboo and viewed as amateur, unless shooting for camp or irony/satire, but I agree with you in that it isn't used enough. Alternatively, the em dash is used and abused (and I'm one of the worst offenders) to the point where writers meme'ing about the em dash has gone mainstream.

I matriculated in a graduate business program which, anyone familiar knows, pays lip-service to APA style guidelines. The citations are either given to you in advance via case studies and academic articles/business cases or you just watch a video every other day to use citation monkey because nobody really cares if your treatments are stylistically correct due to the lack of original research and lack of emphasis or care to publish.

I agree emphatically with your 4th point and would only add that effective communication can also vary by culture and by industry, e.g. Young professionals can say a thousand words with memes, gifs and emoji's, anyone who has seen /bpt or facebook understands there are certain spellings and casual sentence structures that are common and normalized in inner cities and/or certain demographics, and anyone on Wall Street or PE or Management Consulting understands that an email or text from an MD or Partner that says the dreaded "Pls fix thx" means you are in a world of crap (again, to the point of being a meme).

All that said, it blows my mind that anyone would take issue with using a period to form a declarative sentence, especially for front-office/customer facing folks who need to exhibit executive presence and polish. I can see back-office and internal communication being sloppy, but I don't understand, to the point of being skeptical and essentially not buying this premise, that the period is some weird thing now.

Edited August 30, 2020 by Rougarou

[Mole 4339]

I teach college students; they tell me all sorts of insane things — terrifying personal (non-sexual) things that no one should ever hear — but I haven't heard a word about the period... until now, from an old man on the internet. I haven't noticed any avoidance in any student writing either, just lots of misplaced homophones. 

The worst part of the em dash: typing it.

I can never remember how to type it [the em dash], so I Google, copy, and paste as needed.

Edited August 30, 2020 by Mole

[washparkhorn 9973]

17 hours ago, Doc Reeves said:

 “It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words.”

- Winston Smith

Agree. Monoculture is certainly toxic to the human condition and civilization. 1984 lingers in the air long past its due date.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11234794-monoculture

Edited August 30, 2020 by washparkhorn

[washparkhorn 9973]

3 hours ago, Mole said:

The worst part of the em dash: typing it.

I can never remember how to type it [the em dash], so I Google, copy, and paste as needed.

Two-dashes without as space. On my writing machine, the two dashes convert into a proper em-dash. But two-dashes without a space in plain text without autocorrect looks fine to me. 

[washparkhorn 9973]

8 hours ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

So what would Shakespeare think?

No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

[washparkhorn 9973]

13 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

I edit/proofread to the Chicago manual. 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo29172094.html

Interesting viewpoint from the author. 

[B00M 6734]

11 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Single spacing is a sign of laziness.

Wat

 

10 hours ago, El Diablo said:

Single spacers are the folks who will fuck you in the ass and not have the courtesy to give a reach around.

Fair

[B00M 6734]

I assume there's universal disdain for the onboard-style space pre-puncuation ? 

 

 

[TwiceHorn 32077]

14 hours ago, Anastasis said:

You read a book on typography for word processing?

Jesus you are in to some kinky shit man. 

There's a guy, UT undergrad and law and former prof, named Bryan Garner, that is the modern English usage expert.  He gives CLEs on writing for lawdogs and consults on brief-writing for big time cases.  He recommended a book, pretty short like Strunk and White, for how to use the word processor  to make highly visually appealing and readable/legible briefs.

I had learned from my Dad that a lot of thought goes into document design at the professional level and realized that most of us using word processors were rank amateurs, so I thought it something worthwhile to look into.  I was also on a crusade against sans-serif fonts in documents, which has been largely rendered moot because courts mostly require a serif font in papers filed with them.

An alarming number of patent applications are still filed in Helvetica or Arial.  I can get maybe wanting to torture patent examiners, but think it's probably a bad idea.

Edited August 30, 2020 by TwiceHorn

[Reagan1k 3042]

I’m old.  I can still diagram a sentence.  

My default is to be on teams double space, Oxford comma, the use of the semi colon, and no dangling prepositions in emails or formal writing.  

I’m a little less formal in texts and such, depending on the recipient. 

I have an employee who types emails as if he is having a face to face conversation.  I try to explain to him that his message is often misunderstood because he’s typing as if his reader can see his facial expressions and hear his inflection.

It drives me nuts.  For example.......I often have to say “Are you asking a question or making a statement?”  In a verbal conversation, your inflection makes that clear.  In an email, that can’t be heard (especially when the punctuation is missing). 

Much of the root cause is a lack of training and education, but some of it is laziness.

I’m far from perfect and have lost much of my training, but I strive to write as I was taught. 

 

[RDCanecutter 26882]

16 hours ago, Bevo&Pevo said:

So what would Shakespeare think?

He'd just make some shit up, and drive on.

[washparkhorn 9973]

5 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

There's a guy, UT undergrad and law and former prof, named Bryan Garner, that is the modern English usage expert.  He gives CLEs on writing for lawdogs and consults on brief-writing for big time cases.  He recommended a book, pretty short like Strunk and White, for how to use the word processor  to make highly visually appealing and readable/legible briefs.

Bryan Garner is a legal writing god. Hook ‘em. 

https://typographyforlawyers.com

I am not sure Garner recommended Typography for Lawyers, but reading and learning the basics of typography made my legal writing more appetizing to readers. 

Edited August 30, 2020 by washparkhorn

[William_Cannon 86]

I don’t personally don’t believe that children cannot comprehend the concept of a hard stop or period. Children have an innate ability to learn and this is not a hard concept. However, this certainly wouldn’t surprise me in the day and age of common core, participation trophies, and parents who completely trusting and relying on a government run school system. If true, then we have failed as parents and educators, with the bulk of the blame on the parents.


Washpark, where did you pick this up? This is deeply disturbing.

[HRSchenker 2341]

I find it very difficult to read cursive handwriting. 

[washparkhorn 9973]

5 hours ago, William_Cannon said:

Washpark, where did you pick this up? This is deeply disturbing.

Useful Idiots podcast from last week discussing these two articles from the Post:

https://nypost.com/2020/01/08/leaving-a-voicemail-is-rude-and-other-secrets-of-digital-etiquette/

https://nypost.com/2020/08/24/young-people-dont-trust-anyone-who-use-this-punctuation-mark/

Quote

 

While older texters may consider the period an innocent symbol that a sentence has ended, digital natives consider it a triggering form of aggression. The punctuation problem ignited over social media recently, with Gen Z and millennials agreeing that ending a sentence with a period is overly hostile and, worse yet, extremely uncool.

“Only old people or troubled souls put periods at the end of every sentence,” wrote digital culture journalist Victoria Turk in her book on digital etiquette, “Kill Reply All.” The younger generations consider the act of sending a text a sufficient signifier of a complete thought, Turk wrote, making periods feel unnecessary and overly final. “The thing is, in a messaging conversation, a period is simply not necessary,” she explained. “It’s clear when you’ve finished your thought already, so what function does the period fulfill? As a result, using a period in messaging now looks rather emphatic, and can come across as if you’re quite cross or annoyed.”

Spoiler

 

The difference between texts saying “That’s funny” and “That’s funny.” may seem subtle to the sender, but many readers will interpret the latter as far less pleasant and more intense, needlessly.

Social media piled onto the sentiment, thanks to Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett.

“Older people — do you realize that ending a sentence with a full stop comes across as sort of abrupt and unfriendly to younger people in an email/chat? Genuinely curious,” she asked in a since-deleted tweet.

Although the tweet was met with cries of ageism, her argument has a point: In a 2015 study of 126 undergraduates, researchers at Binghamton University found that texts containing periods were also perceived as insincere.

“Texting is lacking many of the social cues used in actual face-to-face conversations. When speaking, people easily convey social and emotional information with eye gaze, facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses, and so on,” said lead researcher Celia Klin in a statement at the time the study was released. “People obviously can’t use these mechanisms when they are texting. Thus, it makes sense that texters rely on what they have available to them — emoticons, deliberate misspellings that mimic speech sounds and, according to our data, punctuation.”

The period’s new, aggressive interpretation can also be used purposefully, for comedic effect.

“While periods at the end of sentences might be on a downward slope, they can find themselves redistributed elsewhere, where they can be placed very deliberately in order to add emphasis,” Turk wrote. This includes putting a period between every word, as in the example she gives: “Just. Look. How. Emphatic. This. Is.”

 

 

 

[formermav43 4628]

Dumb.

[JBJ 3826]

Obligatory punctuation who needs it

[NeverMarryAStripper 22294]

If you get triggered by a period that's your problem, not mine.

[Pato del Muerto 53481]

11 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

Useful Idiots podcast from last week discussing these two articles from the Post:

https://nypost.com/2020/01/08/leaving-a-voicemail-is-rude-and-other-secrets-of-digital-etiquette/

https://nypost.com/2020/08/24/young-people-dont-trust-anyone-who-use-this-punctuation-mark/

 

Ok choosing to not end a text with a period, or even reading one as hostile, is different than saying all periods are bad and must go. 
 

“I’ll be there in 5” and “I’ll be there in 5.” the period is superfluous and if idiot kids want to read tone from it what’s to stop them. 
 

I think the crux of this shit is that Gen z seems to want texting/social media posting shorthand to pervade the entire arena of written conversation as some sort of evolutionary step. 

Edited August 31, 2020 by Pato del Muerto

[Sbbruin 22143]

6 minutes ago, NeverMarryAStripper said:

If you get triggered by a period that's your problem, not mine.

[Hmmm 155]

Twitter is one of the biggest offenders.  Being forced to convey a message with a limited amount of characters dramatically changed the way people communicate.

[washparkhorn 9973]

https://aeon.co/essays/beside-the-point-punctuation-is-dead-long-live-punctuation
 

The semicolon:

“In the hands of a master rhetorician, the semicolon holds out a kind of hanging between delay and arrival, a promise of finality yet reticence.”

Quote

 In his prison letters, Martin Luther King Jr describes the situation of Black people in a state of suspense through a series of sentences separated by semicolons. Only those who haven’t experienced oppression, injustice and violence could push equality into an indefinite future rather than instituting it now. King enumerates different kinds of horrific experiences ranging from lynchings to demeaning names and the psychological trauma of segregation through sentence after sentence separated by semicolons, conjuring a textual experience of both withholding and excess.

 

After a semicolon-rich sentence filling an entire page, King’s voice crashes on the beach of the full stop with damning gravity: ‘when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” – then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

 

 

Edited September 8, 2020 by washparkhorn