211–220 of 260 posts
I find it amusing that programmers use semicolons more often then writers.
It does feel like the semicolon doesn't deserve a position on home row anymore. I would demote it for a different letter or even the question mark. Actually I might try this on my Ergodox.
I had to read a lot of Heidegger, who was interesting on a macro level but interminably boring on the micro level needed to see the macro. His readability was helped by the use of very visible double dashes-- sort of an extended version of the double-comma appositive structure in a sentence-- so the structure of his writing was easier to follow. I liked that much more visual que enough that I adopted it myself for a…
They’re called “em dashes”, and they look like this: — You can find a Real, Genuine Em Dash™ at https://emda.sh , or insert one using ‘C-k - M’ in Vim or ‘Compose - - -’ on Linux — not sure about other platforms.
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Former professional journalist and tech writer here. Disagree. At least since Hemingway brief sentences using periods instead of complicated sentences separated by semicolons has been considered not particularly angry. Short sentences also reduce cognitive load on the reader.
Younger generations interpret it differently.
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Younger generations interpret it differently.
You are correct. But it’s time for them to learn that a semicolon isn’t a danger to anyone.
It’s not that they’re a danger or anything. It’s that you write in a certain way to convey a certain tone and short, period punctuated, sentences is just how you convey anger. You can try to fight the river on this one but it’ll be tough.
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I wish there were more symbols for other use cases, too. I honestly think the standardization of things in the 20th century actually prevented lots of innovations in language and alphabet. Nowadays, you can't even imagine adding or removing a letter to/from the alphabet. Heck, we can't even change the layout of the current alphabet on keyboards because QWERTY is just too much standardized. In fact, forget about alpha…
I totally agree with you. I like using symbols to shape the way I think, and I find using AutoHotKey to to expand typed strings works well for my workflow. Stuff like "qbeta", "qright", "qdegree" and "q@" become β, →, °, and my email. Very useful when I was in university. These days, I use it to type stuff like (ﾟヮﾟ ) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and a black box symbol that HN won't let me type, but is eye catching for when you're scan…
Instead of having separate AHK scripts, I have "one script to rule them all". When Windows launches, "my precious" loads all my scripts. Many of them I use in MS Word.
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Younger generations interpret it differently.
Younger generation needs Grammarly too, so there's that. The lack of punctuation in messaging apps is part of where I point to blame.
I use them a lot to control the tone of what I write. Since periods can indicate a serious or angry tone[1], I often need some other way to indicate a separation between two complete sentences. For example: "It looks like you forgot to do X; that's needed to do Y." Using a period could be perceived as anger, but using a comma would make that sentence a comma splice. [1] https://youtu.be/fS4X1JfX6_Q?t=3m3s
Heh, I think my daughters generation will just replace them with emojis.
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Oh, weird, I find the second off-putting. It's a bit.. Patronizing? Like you're some superior giving orders.
There's a lesson here; never try to infer too much tone from email messages. Or chat channels. Unless you really know the person well.
For generations that grew up as text as the primary form of communication we had to figure out how to convey tone and writing style and emojis is what we had. Tone and the expression of tone are disconnected even when speaking in person and have grammar like rules.