lookashiny: (Default)
lookashiny ([personal profile] lookashiny) wrote2019-02-04 08:41 am
Entry tags:

Writing vent

Did schools stop teaching kids that dialogue needs to have punctuation at the end of it? Because I see entirely too much dialogue in fics that is completely unpunctuated. It's just "I am an example", no period, no question mark, sometimes no commas. Why???
sulien: Daniel "There isn't enough red ink on 3 worlds to fix this." By artifus, credit them if you take it. (editing Daniel)

[personal profile] sulien 2019-02-04 05:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Sing it! I am right there with you.

As for schools, I think far too many of them function more as daycare than institutions of learning, and that only minimally. :-/
muccamukk: text 'Writers expressed themselves with cymbals' with a picture of a set of cymbals (Books: Writing)

[personal profile] muccamukk 2019-02-04 06:05 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't know, but I realised the other day that I don't even notice it any more. Maybe on rereading fic, but first read through my eye just sort of put it in for me.
badfalcon: (Ashee Blonde)

[personal profile] badfalcon 2019-02-04 07:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Now, I left school a few years ago now but we didn't learn anything about punctuation, it's something I've learned through my very patient beta reader. I'm forever messaging her to ask how I punctuate something. And where to put a paragraph break in. They just cared that we could spell.

[personal profile] khronos_keeper 2019-02-04 07:15 pm (UTC)(link)
Interesting. I wonder how much of this is a hold over from texting and chatting, where it's pretty common not to end finishing sentences with punctuation.
lazaefair: (Default)

[personal profile] lazaefair 2019-02-04 09:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Mm, I remember encountering terrible punctuation in fanfiction (including that exact dialogue mistake) as a snobby 12-year-old, so I don't think this is a recent problem. I can't remember my schools teaching punctuation specifically, either (this would be most of the '90s and early 2000s). I know I picked up on most punctuation conventions unusually early just from being a voracious reader, and lucked out genetically on having a brain that remembers language-associated things easily, so I was always a bit mystified that everyone else didn't just absorb what they saw in professionally-edited books and publications.