I favor first-person too. I don't like third-person because I feel far away from my characters, which doesn't work for me. But I like reading third-person. Sometimes, I don't even notice that its third-person! But a character-voice narrative is what I really like to read. On that note, I have yet to read Huckleberry Finn, and I really should. I have heard good things about it. You natives probably speak more concisely than I do. When I speak English verbally, I speak in convoluted sentences and unnecessary words, which is why I said what I said. I really shouldn't write the way I speak. That is a very bad idea for me at least
The last piece I had accepted for publication came back initially with a few minor edit suggestions, one of which was to include a semi-colon. Made me feel like a grown up writer.
Semi-colons are weird. I used to hate them but then realized there were grammatic imperatives that made them necessary, and rephrasing a thought to avoid the imperative was just stupid. It's a cadence and rhythm thing. If you want a sentence to sound a certain way--literally spoken aloud with specific words in a specific order--sometimes a semicolon is necessary to avoid the conjunction or full stop period. On a related note, Cormac McCarthy, who never used a semicolon, ellipsis, quotation mark, or even a comma in certain novels, died today. For some reason, I feel like it's okay to use those "funny little marks" as he called them and not feel ashamed.
I'm sure I use an em-dash in places where it should be a semi-colon. Whatever. If I ever submit anything to publishers and they tell me to change it, I;ll do it. Till then, it remains.
Lol, ironically, every time I try to hit the apostrophe I get a semi-colon, as you can see above. Every freakin; time! What you repress wells up from the unconscious and bites you in the ass.
Em-dashes are weird, too. They used to be used to express parentheticals--typically with the double dash, like this--but then they got lumped in with the ellipses and semi-colons under the conjoined dependants without a conjunction demarcation party. Honestly, grammar will be completely dead in ten years. You can't even get mad at its misuse anymore. Main stream news articles and official correspondence are so rife with it I actually tear up when I see someone using there, their and they're correctly. Or loose and lose, which and which, pour and pore, etc....
Excuse me, what? How do you write an entire novel without commas? I really like em-dashes. A friend of mine compared them to "swords" because they look so sharp in the page if you use them during a striking moment or revelation. It's like you stab the reader with information! But when you use them in place of parenthesis that's different of course. Some book I read some years ago used them to encapsulate character names in their paragraph long descriptions with more than 4 commas. I would dig them out and give the example but I gave the book away years ago because I didn't like it. Please don't say that. I'll loose my mind.
Fairly easily if you're Cormac. You just write without punctuation until the period comes, apparently. Check out The Road. There is a comma here or there but you can go 10 pages without one.
I guess my whole thing is that I completely fail to understand the concept of having a strong personal opinion about a punctuation mark. I can't grasp that idea any more than I can grasp the idea of being strongly opposed to eighth notes in a musical score, or of being strongly opposed to having millimeters and inches on the same ruler, or of being strongly opposed to solid white lines on the highway. It's not like disliking a color, or a word, or a musical key. It's having a strong opposition to a basic component of the larger infrastructure of the language. I'm not saying someone can't dislike, say, inch-and-a-quarter-long drywall screws, I'm just saying that holding such a position strongly is totally baffling to me.
If you want a more detailed explanation of why, it's that it sticks out like a sore thumb visually. Yes, we already established that it can change rhythm of the spoken dialogue, but that doesn't really fix the visual problem. And it really annoys me when it connects together convoluted sentences. For the example I gave, I find it quite okay, but huge sentences and a semi-colon is a no for me. It feels quite messy. Just because something has a well-defined place, doesn't mean that people can't dislike it. I read some Reddit threads a few weeks ago about how people reserve themselves to using two exclamation marks per 80k words. I even read a person who got two use two exclamation marks during her writing life. How is completely baffling to me, but hey... here we are. Too bad I can't find them. Reddit is under fire right now and most subreddits are locked down to protest.
F minor sucks ass. At least on the guitar. Maybe because it bypasses all the open notes except for G, but that's the diminished chord in the progression. Just feels that every note is a half step away from where it should be. And I'm not a fan of the Locrian mode either, though nobody really is. Lousy, theoretical afterthought that can't even get the fifth right where every other triad can.
For me, an ellipsis signals a trailing off, or a longer break. An em-dash is for more of an interruption, or a shorter break
Yeah, I'm with you on that. I just think an ellipsis in the narration seems out of place. I use them sparingly. I also use em dash for parenthetical phrases.
By hyphen, I believe you mean an en dash. An en dash is usually used to mean, "to" or "and" - for example in a range of numbers ... 35-79 An em dash is the convention to show a break or an interruption or to connect two clauses. To type an em dash on the keyboard: On a Mac: Option + Shift + Dash (-) makes an em dash On Windows: hold down the Alt key and type 0151 for an em dash
If you use word you can set it to replace double en-dash with an em-dash, which why you will see double en-dashes when I type on places that don't support that -- like here... incidentally, not sure whether everyone knows, but --fun fact-- the em and the en are printer's references to the size of gaps, "m" being larger.
Yes, en-dash(short hyphen(or short dash)) is new terminology for me. I first became aware of the em-dash(long dash) a year or so ago seeing it used to cite sources at the end of quotes, and it may be the formal way of doing it, but like I said, I'm still using the short one and haven't attempted any transition yet.
Often I would use conjunctions to check between independent clauses to determine if a semi-colon was appropriate, although on rare occasions none seem to be a perfect fit but the semi-colon still appears justified as opposed to the full stop of a period.
