I read some victorian-and-older writers for like 5 minutes and instantly picked up on the habit of capitalizing Important Words as a way of denoting them in an almost formal way, which I really love. It’s so archaic but also annoyingly modern as people find novel (or recycle ancient) ways of emphasizing words in a text-only medium.
(from a random book I found while researching this, also indicates that italics was a separate and available type of emphasis)
Some people say this is a holdover from German where every noun was capitalized
(I guess), but it’s easy to see that it’s never that Consistent.
Once, a person I worked with and knew for about 3 days called me an antiquarian so this is apparently pretty obvious about me.
Anyway I also tend to write in all lowercase when I’m trying to be less formal or self deprecating. I will even omit punctuation sometimes, almost as a method of indicating shame or something??
Also I almost always use either one question mark (formal) or two question marks (informal) but very rarely three (which only indicates incredible amounts of surprise). Same with exclamation points.
Anyway what are your weird ways of writing? Have you thought about them?
oh yeah, and lots of parentheticals. I picked that up from Douglas Adams who usually used it to comedic effect. There’s one chapter opening in particular I am thinking of that it turns out doesn’t have a parenthetical at all, but it does in spirit:
The problem is, or rather one of the problems, for there are many, a sizeable proportion of which are continually clogging up the civil, commercial, and criminal courts in all areas of the Galaxy, and especially, where possible, the more corrupt ones, this.
The previous sentence makes sense. That is not the problem.
This is:
Change.
I love this style of dumb-ass self referential writing.
after a youthful folly regarding correctness in all ways of life being simply logically obvious, I got a grip, relaxed and actively defy the internal censor to let my inner stupidity shine w.r.t. matters of syntax and spelling
also long run on sentences and woefully pedantic diction
I like overusing the abbreviations tbh, tbqh, tbqhimo, etc., to indicate a sort of silly tone. The more unnecessarily long it is, the better it is tbqhimho
Omitting the subject of the sentence like I’m writing a resume bullet
Appending et cetera out of habit because I’m leery of giving the impression that a list is exhaustive if it is not
Forgetting to use contractions
Using commas as breath marks rather than grammatical punctuation, it’s good, though, fuck ‘em
Ending message with comma to indicate I’m holding my breath and/or tongue e.g.
well,
Using em dashes rather than parentheticals because it’s more conversational
Macros set up for e.g. and i.e., sorry
Inconsistent capitalization — leave auto-caps on for phone but use hold-for-shift macros on computers
Acquiring language primarily (as in both “first” and “predominantly”) through mimicry and conceiving of it as a expansive soundboard with no intuition for style as textual prosody lol. lmao
Interested in everyone else’s answers, will not be sharing my quirks, if someone wants to impersonate me they better put in some fucking work, also don’t bother, I’m inimitable you fux
I was thinking the other day about why boomers all pepper their written electronic correspondence with ellipses. I can understand why Millennials do it, video game dialogue boxes were full of that shit and we just copied it. But those dialogue boxes were mostly written by boomers! Where did they get it from?
Yeah I have to actively go back and remove parentheticals from my formal writing I get very carried away with them because I instinctually try to over-explain.
I have fully abandoned the notion of a proper comma. Commas are to be used only for flavor and nothing else. If I want a sentence to seem breathless and run on endlessly, I don’t use commas. If I would naturally pause during a sentence, usually with some kind of hand motion, I stick a comma in there.
It’s kind of interesting how little of this applies to my day job though. There are two fully different modes of throwaway written communication for me. Three if I’m thinking about chat vs. forums!! And several others for writing I intend to stick around and/or edited.
I always put two spaces after periods. I heard somewhere as a kid it was good style (it made more sense with monospace fonts) and the habit stuck, even through the strong vibeshift in the early 2000s towards “two spaces is disgusting”. It’s satisfying to slam the spacebar twice after finishing a sentence and it just doesn’t feel right to me if I don’t.
It’s increasingly moot nowadays because the one-space camp has found ways to enforce their preference regardless of what’s typed. In Markdown (like on this forum) adding spaces doesn’t change the appearance.
i definitely cant think to list them all here, man
i do a lot of not adding apostrophes and not capitalizing when im talking on the forum or in chats. in my writing, less so
i either type everything in small bursts as individual messages/paragraphs like i’m (hey look i used it, fuck you, you’re not my dad i get to be inconsistent okay? also god i do so many parantheticals it’s gotta be exhausting to read my shit. it just comes out of how i speak in real life! my thoughts interject each other constantly, just a real fucken t-bone in the middle of an intersection kinda brain. and like, what would my other option be? to fucken not say what im thinking? they’re both building off of the same idea! i’m gonna follow this branch of the dialog tree, and then rewind reality and continue on where i left off!) talking inside of an RPG textbox and you need to press ‘a’ to advance my dialog, or exhausting diatribes
leaving off periods at the ends of paragraphs
yknow i spell it ‘fucken’ cuz its fun, idunno man
i do not capitalize the ‘x’ in my emoticons. this is half because a friend does it and half because i’ve been bothered by the title Pokémon XD since 2005. why would you do that. people say that!
just too many rhetorical questions. way too many. its cuz i write how i talk! and i talk like an alien who learned to imitate human speech through observation and field testing because that’s what i am (just kidding im not an alien im a monster rawr x3)
uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
yeah idunno man
theres probably more. what even counts as a text quirk
