DemonKia
Posts: 5521
Joined: 10/13/2007
From: Chico, Nor-Cali
Status: offline
|
Huh. Interesting convo, folks.
Huge freaking response follows. You've been duly notified. Ha!
OP: let me start by saying, I'm certainly in no position to get all nit-pickey about the form of the presentation given my most visible textual eccentricities & affectations . .. . . .
--> Various prefatory tangentials:
- For me one of the delights of these discussions is the serendipitous outpouring of other stuff that comes bubbling out along with the answers to the ostensible questions . . .. .
- Dyslexia is a complex of problems with processing data; letter scrambling is only one of those . .. . & it's only one of many 'learning disorders' . ....
- I quite enjoyed reading thru the fireworks that broke out over a certain Elizabethan poet-playwright . . . . . I am an admirer, of sorts, of such things, from a distance . .... They are most educational exchanges on so many levels . ....
- I hope to be a hack, at least occasionally, thank you.
- & Saint Bob the Heinlein taught me that all writers steal, the good ones just do a better job of filing off the serial numbers . . . .. . *gesticulates a perverse variant of a genuflection* . . . . & during the historical time periods under discussion here the prevailing modus for all crafters of anything artistic was to borrow profligately & promiscuously from each other, improving on, or at least varying, the offerings . ... . . . I will leave for another day & another forum the damage done to 'creativity' by excessive focus on 'ownership' . . . . ..
- Oh, & yeah, I rarely read fiction, mostly read for data mining purposes, & what little fiction I do read is more for mood-management or other personal reasons rather than to 'expand' my fiction-reading self . .... . I do read specific classics in relation to my writer-self, reading in that very analytical space of figuring out how I want to 'mine' their good stuff for my own purposes, what portions of their scaffoldings might be useful in percolating my knotty problem of narrative . ... .. .
(& Snow, the one book that would help in having any kind of in-depth conversation with me would be, 'The Emotional Life of Nations' by Lloyd DeMause, much of which is available online . .. . Somewhere in the depths of my journal entries there is a list of other top text influences for me, but, alas, no game theory . . . .  )
- I love to be a pretentious intellectual fuck, when it suits me, & I will totally admit to occasional 'Lives For' moments of enjoyment out of intellectually smacking someone around from that Queen-Snob-Bitch headspace; I also like to be able to communicate with most anyone, when I want to . . .. . . They're not necessarily polar opposites in anything but theory, I suspect . ... ..
--> Much of the following was written early in this thread, & then I set it aside & tried my best to chicken out & not post it (for my fave reason -- avoiding conflict - ha!) . .. . . . But that niggling lil voice egged me on, so here. Way TMI & we're less than halfway thru this long-ass post . . . .. lol . . . . 
The subjects raised here clearly punched some of my buttons, so try not to take any of this personally, any of you; mostly what follows is a festering outpouring of accumulated stuff from 3 decades of 'pursuing writerhood' . . . . .
In retro, one of the earliest places my 'dominance' manifested was in refusing to submit to the Chicago Manual Of Style, et alia . . .. . *shrugs*
I am a middle-school, high-school, & college drop-out. (A trifecta of loser-hood, huh? *waggles eyebrows*)
I've seen plenty of perfectly spelled, excruciatingly correctly grammared pieces of writing that fail to communicate effectively (& plenty of those from my own hand -- ha!) . . . . . & plenty of awkwardly written & spelt missives that convey their messages most powerfully . .. .. . .
I abuse my language as I see fit, I consider it my job as a non-dogmatic, non-doctrinaire, & unorthodox free-lance 'lifestyle' writer (ie, writing is my life) . . . . . It's also my job inasmuch as I am also a trouble-making rebel type, generally .. ...
I've found that my regular use of large-scale multi-syllabics, general reasoning skills, & etc tend to be perceived as 'snobby', 'inaccessible', & similar, especially when coupled to the 'perfected' spelling & grammar & so on that I'm capable of producing . .. . So I deliberately choose / cultivate a more 'informal' written style, as I've found it makes me 'more approachable' . . . . . . A similar process goes on with my spoken style . .... With the result that I 'connect' with a wider array of people than I did when I used more proper formats . . ...
I've also found that I enjoy alternate spellings, ampersands, & plentiful use of the much-maligned ellipse, along with all my other lil idiosyncracies (excess verbosity, out-of-control vocab fetishist, linguistic ornamentalism, absolutely love reading my own words, blah blah blah) . .. ..
In my adventures in 'being a writer' I've grown to see myself existing more outside the 'regular publishing' world; given me druthers I'd ruther be an outlaw to any house book of style other than my own . .... . To 'make money' writers have to 'ho' their stuff, so, if I gotta do all the work I'd ruther be the publisher, too, & make all the money. Thus, darn lil need to 'communicate with the mainstream way o' doin' stuff', jus' the need to speak to an audience . . . . . . & since I generally count on mine bein' somewhere in the less-than 1% category anyways . . .. . *shrug*
I've been writing on computers since 1980, & I pretty much never use spell check other than when it's already built in, such as in these dialogue boxes here on CM for composing these messages -- & then only in deciding whether I agree that the red underline has correctly identified what I consider to be a 'mis-spelling' . .. . .
& spell check's lack of ability to discern between clam & calm, fro & for, or from & form, as examples, makes it nearly useless for me, as many of my typoes / brainoes / etc are the little words . . . .
I'm an excellent speller, for the most part, but I recognize that that talent is just another one of my little freaky specialnesses, & attribute not much more meaning to it than that ...... & I tend to keep in mind, especially when I was rearing the offspring or when dealing with young people, that English is one of the most difficult languages on the planet . . . ..
Spelling is psychotic because English has been synthesized over the centuries out of dozens, even hundreds, of other languages which have contributed vocabulary . ... . . & we lack the simplicity of a 'Latin grammar' (or similar structural elements) to help us keep everything grammatically straight, something I didn't really appreciate until I started studying other languages . . . .. &, to top it off, English currently has the largest 'working vocabulary' of any language that we've ever known, something on the order of a quarter to a half a million words in circulation . . . ... .
lol . . . . (Secret hints for those actually wading thru all this verbiage: the more you write, the better you'll get, just like anything -- practice practice practice; compose your stuff in a text document separate from your online browser, especially lowly bare text kinda programs, those are probably the best to cut & paste from; the set aside -- slow down, take a breath, 'walk away' & do something else & come back to your writing later & go thru it with 'fresh eyes' -- copy editing is actually a lot harder than is generally given credit. The reason so much modern 'properly published product' has so many typoes & such is that they've mostly let go of having that last layer of copy editors who were dedicated to 'perfecting' the copy. Yep, it's another one of those 'cost saving', down-sizing kinda profit-enhancing things, like so many . . .. . Erp, but I'm inducing inordinate topic drift, so . ... .. )
(Time to reiterate that this topic has pricked my particular bubble, & none of this is directed at anyone here with any specificity, unless specifically indicated . . .. . These are issues I was grappling with long before the internet came along; tinpot grammar & spelling dictators are no creation of anything new -- editors (me included) always like to 'pee' in whatever we read, it makes us happy )
& my experience is that when someone specifically chooses to 'knock' my spelling or grammar or whatever, that it usually has darn little to do with my spelling & grammar . .... . (Some 'domly' type tried that in the last week or two (in a cmail) over some deliberate lil grammar slip-up of mine, & at first I didn't even realize there was a 'knock' in progress, & then after I 'got that', I also realized that it was probably way more about that 'domly' person's issues than it had anything to do with me . .. . . Hehehehehe . . . . .)
It vastly amuses me to think people may deprive themselves of data because the formatting of the data is annoying, especially with regard to my offerings . . .. . If people want to hand over the power to annoy them, I'll take it if I want to . . . . . . Hehehehe . .. . . I'm evil like that . ... .
_____________________________
Snarko ergo sum.
The Verbossinator
|
RE: Eduated Subs?!#****! - 
Profile
RE: Eduated Subs?!#@! - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread