what are your text quirks

Anyone who rapid-fire-text-messages me like we’re in an AOL chat room gets their notifications silenced. You’re frazzlin’ my fuckin’ nerves!

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But it’s how I learned to communicate as a child

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I check my phone constantly so I gladly read the messages, the buzz-buzz-buzz will just put me into an early grave

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I think text notifications in general are a bad idea.

In more formal writing, I tend to overuse en dashes - like once a sentence, and then maybe some more clauses for fun. Then I’ll start with a simple clause; use more dashes; get nervous about overuse of dashes; rewrite everything to be a combination of semi-colons and commas; and realize that it’s probably still hard to read a sentence that’s most of a paragraph. Also in formal writing I overuse footnotes and put footnotes on footnotes. Can’t qualify or birdwalk enough.

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autocorrect tops typos

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i looked up the Australian Government style guide on em vs en dashes because i was confusing myself with my usage—the guide didn’t clear things up much but it seems like no-one recommends a spaced em-dash so it was nice to eliminate one option at least

n

N

m

M

hmmmmmmmmm

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aren’t en dashes exclusively for numerical ranges?

i do space hyphen space all the time even though i know the alt codes for dashes, i guess because the point is to quickly bash out another thought without breaking the flow of typing too much. sometimes on here i remember that you can get them just by stacking hyphens though - – — ----

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nah you can use them most whereever you’d use a dash. hyphens should really only be used for a couple of things like words going over line-breaks and compound words

but it doesn’t matter, use whatever you want that makes sense to your audience

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unspaced en dashes are for ranges yeah iirc, spaced en dashes are interchangeable with unspaced ems for asides. there was something else for unspaced but i forgot

Yeah, when i was a younger English major, I was super insistent that everyone do things the right way. and while I can still be judge-y about that in certain contexts (formal writing and such), most of the time I don’t care. I became very Descriptivist about grammar sometime in grad school, which is funny because I was working in the Writing Center at the time, so I was paid to be the opposite of that.

The one that I always still do is British stule comma placement with quotations. American writing tends toward the oversimplified “always put the comma inside the quotations,” (as I just did for illustration), but I learned it as it only sneaks in if the thing in quotations is the main clause of the sentence (which is why that illustration took me extra work to do, and why I still felt like putting the comma after the parenthetical). I have had people get very mad at me about this.

I tend to start things with “I mean” too often.

I also notably don’t care about Oxford commas and find people who are very vocal about them annoying. Use them if you want; it’s fine either way. I could probably think of more of these, because I have sat in way too many editorial meetings about deciding the company style for these, but I mostly don’t care much.

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Like a lot of nerds that have become (hopefully) less insufferable as they’ve aged—and as I’ve gone through grad school and started doing academic copyediting professionally—I’ve also eased up on giving a shit about anyone else’s grammar, punctuation, etc. in most things aside from pretty formal writing (like published academic material). Things give me a little sting sometimes, like a bad comma or excessive ellipses, but language is an unruly and beautiful beast, and its usage by the people who use it is in fact its usage.

I do this too, and I’m not always sure what my reasoning for doing it is. It definitely signals something more casual, or more self-deprecating. I’ll even switch mid-conversation, and it probably signals something but what it signals is often on the subconscious level.

I used to use parentheses to excess—and I still use them a fair bit—but doing more academic writing/editing has chilled me out on them. I’m more inclined to use em dashes (finally learning the ALT codes for en dashes and em dashes was a big deal for me) or figure out how to incorporate it into the main body of what I’m saying—or in more informal communication like real-time chatting just spitting it out as an aside in the awful stream of consciousness flow of lowercase, punctuationless messages.

I put a lot of likes and uhs in my texts/messages/posts now, which is a fairly recent thing.

I start too many sentences with “Oh damn” or “Oh wow.”

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oh yeah i used to be self-conscious of saying and typing “like” so much but i’ve just leaned into full thembo grammar i guess

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if there are different kinds of dashes how come my keyboard only has one key? checkmate, establishment

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I just use varying amounts of standard-dashes for my dash related needs—like so—and if the forum software doesn’t automatically convert them then, well, sucks to be you, reader.

*hits preview*

I guess you all are lucky today.

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Did the iPhone invent pressing spacebar twice at the end of a sentence to insert a period and a space? That’s a good feature, thank you tech overlords. They should let me do that on real computers.

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Blackberry! At least as early as the Pearl keyboard.

Popularized by David Pogue and nicknamed the “Pogue Period”

I think MacOS has had it as an option since Sierra and Windows has since 8, btw

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I just write like I talk. I do it in legal writing too, all the judges are fucking morons who can’t tell the difference anyway.

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you’re way louder in the fleshzone IMO

my typing quirk is hating teh delete key

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well the lowercase thing i’ve been doing for like ever at this point. i even do it when i write poetry. sometimes i change the spelling of night for ’ nite ’ or say tonite like because of commercials from the 90s or something idek

someone told me i type like a teenager once and
that’s fine

there are worse things i could do with my writing that i will never release publicly or privately. i think of fanfic, sometimes complete conversations in my head between star-crossed lovers or crack!ships and never write them down because i don’t feel like getting dragged.

a lot of it is therapy for myself ; a way to cope.

one thing i noticed in high school is that i always got high marks in english but if you ever wanted me to understand grammar then i must say i am definitely here on this earth to disappoint you and only you.

i do what i want when i write tho and have been for years.
sometimes i actually spell out ’ though ’ and it looks strange as shit to me

my writing used to be more flowery but i kinda forgot how to do it because it was just a depressed hispter kid who read way too much murakami and poetry and wanted to impress pple kind of quirk

i put spaces between punctuation marks because i think it looks ’ weird ’ the other way
some other fun stuff ab my writing is that i used to write IN ALL CAPS because there was this smart girl in class ( who wound up skipping a grade ) who did it. she was the only one that was allowed to do it.

now that i think ab it, that’s p shit.
i don’t think skipping grades is cool anymore.
it seems like it would be p traumatizing.

anyway, writing is art and you can do
all sorts of ( really ) cool things and make it your own

fuck the rules
rip 'em up
tear 'em down

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someone half my age told me I have tik tok voice (female) and I cannot deal with it at all. I’m destroyed. I’m like the equivalent of the lady who tells you the time on the phone!! she said ‘not when you’re yelling’ BUT MY SOUL STILL WITHERS

kinda wanna lean into it though? maybe I don’t even have to try maybe it’s just the natural deterioration of my body and mind that has led to this. I accept

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