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Standard Typing and You

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Standard Typing and You Empty Standard Typing and You

Post  Owl Wed Dec 29, 2010 11:38 pm

Standard Typing and You:
a "helpful articles" sticky


Oh heeeey! I'm Owl, and welcome to "Standard Typing and You"! This article will cover the many different ways people choose to type on the Internet, and why those things should generally be kept away from roleplaying. Here's a quick outline of what we'll be talking about:


I. Overview of Standard Typing
II. Common Idiosyncrasies in Internet Typing
a. Capitalizing every word
b. Capitalizing no words
c. Infrequent/improper use of punctuation.

Being that this is version 1, expect to see some updates in the future. This article becomes more helpful with assistance from users like you!

Section I: Overview of Standard Typing

Believe it or not, there is a correct way to type your internet-prose! Most of this can be learned in a grade-school English class, but sadly a lot of people neglect it when they start to roleplay. Proper use of capitalization and punctuation not only makes your writing more understandable, but it shows your partner(s) that you respect them and that you take pride in your work. As a refresher (because, like I said, you should have learned this in school):

  • Proper nouns (peoples' names, specific locations, brand names, etc.) should begin with a capital letter.
  • The beginning word of each sentence should be capitalized.
  • There should be a single space between any punctuation mark (except the apostrophe! xD; ) and the next word.
  • Every sentence needs just one punctuation mark at the end, except in cases where "!?" is appropriate.
  • For quotes: if the quote ends in a comma, the next phrase doesn't need to be capitalized.
      example 1: "I'm going to the store," said Janice.

  • USE ALLCAPS VERY SPARINGLY. IT SCARES PEOPLE.



Try to remember these things as we proceed deeper into the dark abyss of:

Section II: Common idiosyncrasies in Internet typing

An "idiosyncrasy" is, essentially, a behavior that doesn't conform to the established norm (usually unique to a person). The way I'm using it here is to refer to the common patterns of typing used as an alternative to the correct method. In casual conversation, type however you want; we really don't care--but typing correctly really does show respect for other people, so it would be better to get used to it while you're writing. Let's be frank: no book ever got published in sTiCkY cApS. (note: I'm not doing anything about sticky caps, because I'm praying to Bog or God that nobody roleplays like that.)


    Part A: Capitalizing Every Word

    A Common Trend Among People On Gaia, Deviantart And Elsewhere Is To Capitalize Every Word In A Sentence (Or Almost Every Word), As If Everything They Say Is The Title To Something. Not Only Does This Baffle Me Completely, But It's A Messed-Up Way To Type A Roleplay Post. Seriously, Man.

    Now: I don't know if this is a real thing, but if for some reason your computer does that for you and you can't turn it off, you're fine on this one, and I'm sorry your hardware sucks so bad. We'll all pitch in to buy you a new keyboard someday.

    If you're doing it of your own volition: stop it. Just don't do it anymore. Capitalizing every letter is confusing in a roleplay scenario because it makes it impossible to tell by looking when something actually important is mentioned. The ability for people to read your posts quickly is helped by the fact that names and places have capital letters in them, meaning a person can tell when you mentioned a character or where you're located. Imagine looking for a red dot on a white background: you can see it, right? Now imagine trying to find that same red dot on a background made entirely of red dots. That's how people feel when they look at chunks of text with every word capitalized.

    Another thing here is the disruption of peoples' internal voices. For example: when I read a sentence in my head, my tone is infulenced by the presentation of words. As an English-speaker, I'm programmed to read long strings of capitalized words as titles. When you type with every word capitalized, I'm unable to flow through the sentence like a normal one: I have to consider every word for a millisecond longer, which makes a big difference in a three or four-paragraph post (and higher!). It's very irritating to do, and it does bother people.

    TL;DR: There's absolutely no point in doing this.

    A subset of this phenomenon is capitalizing random words/nouns. I don't understand this either; it's far less jarring than every word, but still a little bit strange. The exception I can see here is if German is your first language, you can capitalize whichever nouns you want. If not, well, stop it.

    Part B: Capitalizing no words

    this is the more benign twin brother to part a, and what hipsters and generally "cool" people like to do on normal posts. it's confusing because you can't tell by looking where a sentence begins, or what's important in that sentence. it doesn't suffer from the same voice problem that part a does, though, so i'd consider it at least two points lower on the "don't do this" scale.

    You should still probably capitalize where appropriate. But hey, if you've got to pick one, go with this one.

    Part C: Infrequent/improper use of punctuation.

    This category covers: not ending sentences with punctuation, using things that aren't fullstops as fullstops, too many question marks, too many exclamation points. The blanket message here is: if you don't use punctuation, and use it right, no one can understand what you wrote--or, in other cases, screws up the way your posts sound in other peoples' heads. Let's go through a few examples, using our good friend Janice again. Here's a standard, correctly-executed li'l snippet:


      It was already raining when Janice got to the store. She rushed into the building, heading straight for the produce department.

      What some people like to do is use "..." (an ellipse) as a fullstop. It isn't one. Simple as that. Using it in the place of "." makes your post sound blasé, and not at all deep or emotional (which is what I assume people are thinking).

      It was already raining when Janice got to the store... She rushed into the building, heading straight for the produce department...

      Already I feel like I'm being told these events by someone who's either really tired or trying too hard to seem emo. It's not working.

      Another problem is using fullstops where commas should be:

      She rushed into the building. Heading straight for the produce department.

      No. "Heading straight for the produce department" has no subject, so it can't be its own statement. Now, we know style sometimes dictates the use of things that aren't sentences--but in general cases, like this one, let's avoid it.

    Those are some pretty good ones there, and we'll delve more into punctuation in some other article. To conclude this section, let's look at the "????" and "!!!!" phenomenon--namely, the use of more punctuation than you need for "emphasis". One exclamation point gives the maximum amount of emphasis; same with question marks. The only place you should see "????" is in a sequence of steps, directly preceding "PROFIT!!!!"

    We cool? Good.



I hope someone was helped by this! If you see something amiss here, or you have questions, feel free to message me cat

---Owl

Owl
Owl
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Posts : 24
Join date : 2010-12-29
Age : 30
Location : Jacksonville, Florida

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