Anyway, I think we should wrap up this conversation -- DDN is a diverse community made up of people with different writing styles, and people should use their best judgment when contributing content...
ac
Taran Rampersad wrote:
This is certainly an interesting discussion... Here's my two cents on what really are *style* issues:
(1) Exclamation marks are an exception, not a rule. If your exclamation mark is worn off your keyboard before the 'period' , verily, thou art doing something wrong and shall be punished by not being read. (2) All Caps are a sign to many people that keyboards are new to you. The same emphasis is often represented by placing astericks around a word, like *so*. In doing this, smart tools such as derivatives of Mozilla automatically bold the text for the reader and show that there is emphasis. All caps are reserved for ACRONYMS. :-) (3) Question marks at the end of questions are good. Even rhetorical questions? Yes, even rhetorical questions. (4) Run on sentences irritate the reader and make people wonder what you are writing about because they are uncertain where the subject in the sentence is and also because they do not see any emphasis by way of punctuation and all sorts of other things that many people can hardly explain but can certainly tell when reading. (5) Speeling things wrang is bod. (6) Different cultures may see this all differently, and people who speak/write other languages natively may be easily confused by too many acronyms, too much punctuation, and improper sentence structure.
Look... to each their own. Language - especially English - morphs unchecked. In the case of English, there are only mavens - no authorities (unlike French, where there are committees just for words)... but I do not read anything in all caps, and therefore I do not respond to it.
If you find that you're being misunderstood by the majority of people, consider changing the way you write. I do this every day, and I still have a lot of room for improvement.
-- ----------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldivide.net http://www.tsunami-info.org Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com ----------------------------------- _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
