Thing I learned yesterday/today.

Punctuation is weird.

I mean, I knew that before, obviously.

But Lariope has been trying to help me clean my fic up so I can submit it to the Archive That Shall Remain Nameless For the Moment, and she has been explaining all the changes (mostly punctuation) and why she's changing them.

And then I had to ask her to explain several of them again, because I was the crappiest English major on the planet and never really bothered to learn about things like comma splices and dangling partiwhatisits and when a comma is appropriate and when it should be a semicolon.

Last night she explained the differences between hyphens, em dashes and en dashes. I am just going to admit outright that I didn't even know an en dash was a thing. Seriously, I figured they were all sort of just hyphens, I swear. One of them was just bigger than the other, like an uber hyphen.

Apparently, this is not the case.

ALSO, did you know that there are no spaces between em dashes and the words before and after them?

I didn't.

That just completely blows my mind.

How can you even read things like that? With the words and the uber hyphen all smushed up together.

ALSO ALSO, did you know that an ellipse isn't supposed to be three periods in a row? It's supposed to be three evenly spaced periods . . . With spaces between them, according to the punctuation guide on the Nameless Archive that I was looking through in an effort to figure out how to make uber hyphens not look like two hyphens just hanging out together. How is that not awkward to look at?

Anyway, I've got to go back through the corrections I've already made to both parts of Neither the Laurel Nor the Rose, so that I can do the em dash smush (which sounds like a new dance craze that those young whippersnappers are always coming up with), but I think I'm going to just pretend I don't know about that rule in my every day typing of words sort of thing. Definitely not going to do it when I hand write things because I will never be able to read any of it.

My handwriting is made of pleh.

This post is brought to you by the letters E, R and M, and the number i.

Thing I learned yesterday/today.

Punctuation is weird.

I mean, I knew that before, obviously.

But Lariope has been trying to help me clean my fic up so I can submit it to the Archive That Shall Remain Nameless For the Moment, and she has been explaining all the changes (mostly punctuation) and why she's changing them.

And then I had to ask her to explain several of them again, because I was the crappiest English major on the planet and never really bothered to learn about things like comma splices and dangling partiwhatisits and when a comma is appropriate and when it should be a semicolon.

Last night she explained the differences between hyphens, em dashes and en dashes. I am just going to admit outright that I didn't even know an en dash was a thing. Seriously, I figured they were all sort of just hyphens, I swear. One of them was just bigger than the other, like an uber hyphen.

Apparently, this is not the case.

ALSO, did you know that there are no spaces between em dashes and the words before and after them?

I didn't.

That just completely blows my mind.

How can you even read things like that? With the words and the uber hyphen all smushed up together.

ALSO ALSO, did you know that an ellipse isn't supposed to be three periods in a row? It's supposed to be three evenly spaced periods . . . With spaces between them, according to the punctuation guide on the Nameless Archive that I was looking through in an effort to figure out how to make uber hyphens not look like two hyphens just hanging out together. How is that not awkward to look at?

Anyway, I've got to go back through the corrections I've already made to both parts of Neither the Laurel Nor the Rose, so that I can do the em dash smush (which sounds like a new dance craze that those young whippersnappers are always coming up with), but I think I'm going to just pretend I don't know about that rule in my every day typing of words sort of thing. Definitely not going to do it when I hand write things because I will never be able to read any of it.

My handwriting is made of pleh.

This post is brought to you by the letters E, R and M, and the number i.