An Actual Entry (Let's Go Again And Again And Again)
In an effort to be more awake, I'm pouring more words out onto the page. It's funny, I don't ever think of this as a screen; to me it's just blank paper that hasn't come out of the printer yet.
I was thinking about this, I remember when I was in seventh grade, and I had to have special permission from the principal to use my Sony (Panasonic? I don't remember) combination word processor and electric typewriter to do my homework instead of writing it all by hand.
The faculty was convinced that the magic Kom-pew-TOR would somehow enable me to cheat.
This was back before spellcheck. Or maybe it's just that my word processor was cheap and oldish; a 1988 Something or Other that I loved forever until it finally died in 1999.
It was big, and heavy, with a screen space of maybe 13", text-only (black background, white text). You printed your documents by feeding paper into the roller at the top. I learned about setting margins the hard way.
I used to have to buy typewriter ribbon.
There are days I miss it terribly. The sound, smell, feeling of something I just wrote knocking out of the printer, bang bang BANG hiccup hiccup BANG, one letter at a time.
Inkjet is fast and dead silent by comparison, but there's no sense of reward to it. Pages just fly outward, fully grown, like Athene leaping free of Daddy Zeus' headache.
Also, I'm going nearsighted. Astigmatism gallops through my family, and so do migraines; I've caught them both at exactly the genetically pre-determined time. Anyone who thinks your genes aren't a giant chunk of your physical health and body history is full of crap. I had better than 20/20 my whole life, effortlessly, until about five years ago.
I don't need corrective lenses yet, but I will soon. I can feel it in the way I squint. I have to guess at roadsigns, sometimes; I never had to before.
And now I'm thinking! SEMICOLONS. How do you use them?
I treat them exactly as I would a full stop or period.
The only problem with that, stylistically, is that I lean on fragments to make my point. I do it on purpose, or at least I did, until it became part of my style.
People use that word in pretentious ways, but the word itself is correct; your style is the way you speak on the page.
Anyway. Fragments. I use them.
There are places they work well. We often talk in fragments. For example, "Turn left here! Your OTHER LEFT."
Sometimes I will have a sentence like, "There are four lights; nothing else." And technically that's incorrect. Same as it would be with a full stop.
I used to get a lot of beta ink for that. That and comma splices.
That, however, I was doing on purpose. The comma splices are unintentional; the semicolons are not.
I'd never had it explained to me that the ideas in a clause pair had to be related, or at least it was ideal in best practice, until I was a senior at college.
I spent about a decade frustrated over the fact that the faculty could pick on my clause structure, but couldn't explain to me what a clause was.
How much effort would it have taken to say "A clause is a complete sentence."
(I mean, that's not strictly true, but I was eight! And it would have kept me from messing it up.)
I didn't learn how to write in school. I learned how to write by copying what I saw happening in novels. Everything they try to teach on grammar in schools? Not worthless, not exactly. But they don't know how to explain it. Because half the time they're parroting whatever it says in the back of the teacher's guide.
(I've seen the insides of those. They are bewildering to the point of terror.)
"No, it's wrong; the book is wrong." To borrow a Firefly.
Anyway, I'm not so sure this had a point, but it rattled out nicely. ^_^
I was thinking about this, I remember when I was in seventh grade, and I had to have special permission from the principal to use my Sony (Panasonic? I don't remember) combination word processor and electric typewriter to do my homework instead of writing it all by hand.
The faculty was convinced that the magic Kom-pew-TOR would somehow enable me to cheat.
This was back before spellcheck. Or maybe it's just that my word processor was cheap and oldish; a 1988 Something or Other that I loved forever until it finally died in 1999.
It was big, and heavy, with a screen space of maybe 13", text-only (black background, white text). You printed your documents by feeding paper into the roller at the top. I learned about setting margins the hard way.
I used to have to buy typewriter ribbon.
There are days I miss it terribly. The sound, smell, feeling of something I just wrote knocking out of the printer, bang bang BANG hiccup hiccup BANG, one letter at a time.
Inkjet is fast and dead silent by comparison, but there's no sense of reward to it. Pages just fly outward, fully grown, like Athene leaping free of Daddy Zeus' headache.
Also, I'm going nearsighted. Astigmatism gallops through my family, and so do migraines; I've caught them both at exactly the genetically pre-determined time. Anyone who thinks your genes aren't a giant chunk of your physical health and body history is full of crap. I had better than 20/20 my whole life, effortlessly, until about five years ago.
I don't need corrective lenses yet, but I will soon. I can feel it in the way I squint. I have to guess at roadsigns, sometimes; I never had to before.
And now I'm thinking! SEMICOLONS. How do you use them?
I treat them exactly as I would a full stop or period.
The only problem with that, stylistically, is that I lean on fragments to make my point. I do it on purpose, or at least I did, until it became part of my style.
People use that word in pretentious ways, but the word itself is correct; your style is the way you speak on the page.
Anyway. Fragments. I use them.
There are places they work well. We often talk in fragments. For example, "Turn left here! Your OTHER LEFT."
Sometimes I will have a sentence like, "There are four lights; nothing else." And technically that's incorrect. Same as it would be with a full stop.
I used to get a lot of beta ink for that. That and comma splices.
That, however, I was doing on purpose. The comma splices are unintentional; the semicolons are not.
I'd never had it explained to me that the ideas in a clause pair had to be related, or at least it was ideal in best practice, until I was a senior at college.
I spent about a decade frustrated over the fact that the faculty could pick on my clause structure, but couldn't explain to me what a clause was.
How much effort would it have taken to say "A clause is a complete sentence."
(I mean, that's not strictly true, but I was eight! And it would have kept me from messing it up.)
I didn't learn how to write in school. I learned how to write by copying what I saw happening in novels. Everything they try to teach on grammar in schools? Not worthless, not exactly. But they don't know how to explain it. Because half the time they're parroting whatever it says in the back of the teacher's guide.
(I've seen the insides of those. They are bewildering to the point of terror.)
"No, it's wrong; the book is wrong." To borrow a Firefly.
Anyway, I'm not so sure this had a point, but it rattled out nicely. ^_^