Who Cares?
Things I Don’t Particularly Care About:
- Charlie Sheen. Oh yay, the Mel Gibson rerun is on.
- Bristol Palin’s book deal. People are fascinated by celebrities (see previous point), and often buy their books. Publishers like to make money. The fact that a publisher thinks people will buy a Palin book is neither shocking nor new.
- Reality TV.
- Pointless online drama. Drama Llama sez, “Piss off.”
Things I Do Care About:
- Con or Bust auctions run through March 6. Check ’em out. Some good stuff up for bid, and the money raised is used to help PoC attend SFF conventions. Intro post is here.
- One space or two after a period? This used to be in the previous column, until I came across 6 Surprising Bad Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users. “on the web … double-spacing after a period can create ‘rivers’ within text that make it difficult for users to find the end of sentences…” This is going to be a very difficult habit for me to train myself out of.
- Whether to use…or . . . for ellipses when formatting an e-book. I asked on Twitter, and the majority favored… Yes, nitpicky author is nitpicky. (Also recommended: unicode character … for …)
- The fact that so many of our elected officials seem to be mainlining uncut WTF these days.
Ali
March 3, 2011 @ 10:09 am
I’ve been re-training myself to use one space. It’s the most commonly accepted format. It’s kind of pain, but I’ve been able to do it.
As for the ellipsis, I prefer the wider spaced one — but I’m also not an avid e-book reader.
Jim C. Hines
March 3, 2011 @ 10:13 am
I prefer . . . in print, but I found it was leading to odd line breaks in the e-book. There are some tricks I could use to try to force the characters to stay together, but I don’t know that they’d work too well or look as good as I want in the final text on the screen. I’ve gone ahead and updated everything to … in the e-book files, but knowing me, I’ll obsess over it and revisit the formatting at least a few more times between now and the March 15 release 😛
D. Moonfire
March 3, 2011 @ 10:20 am
As a programmer, the frustrating part of single space after periods is that you have to understand the context to know that “I like Dr. Mary going home.” is only one sentence. Yeah, it’s obvious when you read it, but for purely syntactical parsing (e.g., screen readers, text to speech) it makes it difficult. “.” is a full stop at the end of a sentence, and effectively a contraction in the other. But, sadly, it isn’t going to change any time in the future. Though, “I like Dr’ Mary going home.” looks strange too. 🙂
I’m very fond of Unicode, mainly because it lets the typographer decide how to format it. So, if someone wants “. . .” for ellipses, it makes it really easy to do that while keeping it a single character for those who prefer it condensed to a single character width. I also use other Unicode letters for my constructed languages, not only for the “feel” of the language but to give me an idea of the script. Even if I change the appearance of the glyphs, I can still use the Unicode mappings for easy rendering. I like to see my fake languages in their fake native script. 🙂
The only rule that always throws me is ellipses at the end of a sentence. I’ve read that a complete, but trailing sentence, should have four periods (three for the ellipse, one for the full stop). I usually go with three periods every time, mainly because I use the Chicago Manual of Style for English references.
And for the uncut WTF, I have no clue. Reporting is also really virulent, with everyone reporting different things. It makes it hard because our knowledge sources are also heavily biasing stuff, which just makes everything worse.
Jess Granger
March 3, 2011 @ 10:36 am
Two spaces is so ingrained in my muscle memory, that I do a find and replace for all my double spaces as the final step in all my editing processes. That way I don’t have to worry about it, except online. But it doesn’t seem to be as big of an issue online as in a 100K novel.
I also don’t care about Charlie Sheen. I just wish people would stop gawking like he’s an animal in some carnival sideshow. That really makes me a bit sick.
JRVogt
March 3, 2011 @ 11:04 am
I’ll take ellipses and spaces after periods over politics and celebrities any day.
Jim C. Hines
March 3, 2011 @ 1:09 pm
🙂
Jim C. Hines
March 3, 2011 @ 1:10 pm
I was trying to consciously keep to one space while commenting in LJ earlier today, and was starting to be able to do it. But when I took my lunch break and worked on the novel? The fingers flew right back into their normal 20+ habits…
Jim C. Hines
March 3, 2011 @ 1:12 pm
I’ve read the same thing re: ending sentences, and using the three periods for the ellipsis and a fourth to denote the end of the sentence. I’m comfortable with either, but I get twitchy when I come across people just shooting periods out there with a machine gun…….. Know what I mean?
The programming issue is an interesting point, and I hadn’t considered that. I don’t know how you’d code it, and now that I think about it, I run into that problem sometimes with autocorrect trying to capitalize the next word after an abbreviation. Hm….
House
March 3, 2011 @ 1:28 pm
Regarding the number of spaces after a period on the web, well, when I learned HTML about 15 years ago, one of the things we learned was that the number of spaces between words didn’t matter. I can put one space after a period, 2 spaces, or 100 spaces, and it will show up just the same in my browser. I tried it out again just now, and it does indeed still work that way (in Firefox, at least).
Of course, there are ways to force spaces in, and it wouldn’t surprise me if various web authoring tools actually do that. But by default, the web doesn’t care about spacing between any of your words, just that there is some space there. Alas, if only HTML was used as it was meant to be—semantic markup—rather than usually treated as just presentation markup.
D. Moonfire
March 3, 2011 @ 2:00 pm
Natural Language Process (NLP) is this huge field that tries to solve that problem. When working on Author Intrusion, I’m using a NLP library to help with breaking down English sentences and it is not a simple thing to use (or write or even document) even with a large corpus of examples. And as far as I know, no program can parse every English sentence correctly (ignoring those sentences that experts can’t decide how to parse). I’m working with Good Enough™ with that. 🙂
A friend once told me, “don’t trust anyone who uses more than one exclamation point in a sentence.” Multiple periods are fine, as long as it is 3 or 3+1. 🙂
The beautiful thing about the language is that it is so flexible. It has enough redundancy to make it useful, simplicity to make it effective, and flexibility to make it do what you want instead of forcing you into One True Way™. In the end, it doesn’t really matter except for consistency. Once you pick one, stick with it. At least for the story, book, or series. The choice you make is really has to do with ascetics anyways. You can make . . . work, just by using non-breaking spaces, but it might be too much work (search and replace can fix that). I prefer the Unicode, but that is because my writing toolchain automatically converts it and I appreciate the technological advantages of it. Though, when I’m typing online, I’m happy to use three periods because I don’t have a full typographical autocorrect built into Firefox.