OK, I’ve got me flak jacket ready.
There seems to be… a spreading trend… on this forum… to replace… all punctuation… with dots… and… it does… make reading posts… a very… stop start… process… which… makes me feel… slightly… queasy… and… also… doesn’t help… with understanding… in the same… way… that… nice crisp sentences… with good… old-fashioned punctuation… like… full-stops… commas… question marks… semi-colons and colons… if you’re that way inclined… even brackets… and the occasional… exclamation mark… would…
It used to be… one or two posters… but… it seems… to have become… contagious…
Does anyone else… feel… the same…
Guilty as charged, m’lud.
But in my defence, I was taught that “…” indicates a pause / breath ; add to this that there are so many grammatical errors perpetrated on the interweb these days, I prefer not to fall prey to the grammar nazis (not a reference to you personally) that seem to float freely in the ether, waiting to exert the superiority.
I do however fully agree that punctuation has gone the way of so many other things.
That’s Me!! I use dots quite often…because the screen on my tablet has lost a lot of its ooomph, so the result is it sometimes sticks words or phrases together, with other errors!!!
I thought it was just my son who got annoyed with dots. I will remember to NOT do dots here, too!
Dots do imply a certain sense of mystery… What is going to happen next…
But its true. Everyone will get sick of too many of my dots, I should get the screen fixed.
Yes I take that point. But forum posts aren’t normally written to be read out loud, and people don’t normally need to pause or stop to breathe when they’re reading to themselves.
Isn’t it a bit like doing all the facial expressions and hand gestures as you write the post? Folk won’t see them so you can’t rely on them to bring your post to life, and unless you adapt it to be read rather than listened to it risks coming across as monotonous and expressionless.
To me dots simply mean that you’re pausing to reflect on what to say next, or you’ve got to an unanswerable question so you’re leaving it to other people to think about. By extension, too many dots mean that the writer is not thinking very joined up and is not at all sure of what they’re saying.
That’s a wonderful thought…posters doing all the facial expressions and hand gestures!! I think it might be a good exercise to get more free expression into written ideas…
Agreed, but I think it’s been mentioned before that context can be difficult to convey ; hence, the ever present emojis.
I do try to read posts in the same way they appear to have been “written”, but we’re all different, & if I succeed at least some of the time, I take that as a minor victory.
OK I’ve said my bit and I’ll leave it there.
Of course there are people who talk like that as well, with an errm and an ummm after every word. Or the current crop of verbal ticks like “so” and “right” and “like”. So, like, it’s hard not to think “for goodness’ sake get on with it”, right, and like, so right you like start fidgeting about waiting for them to get to the end of what they’re saying. Perhaps all to do with getting more intolerant as one gets older. But I find them hard to listen to and avoid them for preference.
Ellipsis. No need for it most of the time, but perhaps it is a convenient, albeit inappropriate, solution for anyone hesitating between a comma and a semi-colon.
