6 thoughts on “Tweet of the Day, HOW ABOUT YOU JUST SAY WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY TO MY FACE, @alexthechick? edition.”

  1. The fuzzy abomination looking longingly at the white powder on the tabletop – its cubical grains seek access to his hind brain; only by burying his face in their crunchy embrace can he quench the siren call.

  2. What? No parenthetical asides?

    Semicolons are a red flag for me. The urge to insert one almost always means that I’ve structured something poorly, and that I’m trying to rationalize papering over the problem instead of going back to fix it.
    I can safely say that I used more semicolons in blue book tests than in all the years since.

    A sentence is a complete thought. Those of us who are ADHD AF don’t often have those, at least, not all at once.

  3. “These street writers never set out to abuse punctuation. Clarity of thought is hard out here, so you slip in a colon to show cause and effect. Before you know it, you’re second guessing semi-colons and can’t tell a hyphen from a dash in a run-on sentence so long it should be three paragraphs but wants to win a marathon instead. Don’t dangle your participles, kids.”

  4. Use the right tool set for the right job.

    Are you trying to convert something clearly?

    Perhaps instead you want to capture an impression of a mental state — immerse the reader in the perceptions of a mind drifting ever so slightly off kilter from reality; or perhaps reality itself is drifting off kilter…

    Just relay facts:
    – sentence fragments
    – raw data
    – reference information
    – recipes and outlines

    As a writer, one should understand the conventions of the field, what the tools do, and when one should break the rules intentionally. Only then can one communicate to the reader exactly as one intends.

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