USE ENGLISH! ...posted by Silverhour

Once again, I feel inclined to call people on thier blatent abuse of the Engish language. This is getting out of hand. For chat purposes, great, use all the slang and short form you want. But when posting a story, it's a real eye-sore to see words like pepl, gov'ment, koolies, u, r, y... I could go on for a while, but I think you get my drift. Is the extra keystrokes really that hard to do?

One letter words bug me the most, like "u"; is a "yo" to hard to put in front? Are the "a" and "e" so offensive that the word "are" has them removed? Come on people, the words are short enough as it is, do we REALLY need to shorten them even more? I could see using accepted short form, like gov't, for example. It would be better than dropping 3 letters from gov'ment, you might as well have put them in for all the effort an ' would create. Maybe it's just me, maybe my typing skills give me an air of superiority in this field. Maybe for people who are "one-key wonders" it takes too long to hunt-and-peck for every key. But if you're taking the time to write a story, you should put the effort into it.

Punctuation is another important point to focus on. Periods end sentences, they break the flow of a line into understandable sections. Quotation marks surround a persons speech, and are often used to emphasize specific words. Apostraphes are used to indicate compound words. (You are = you're) Commas are similar to periods, indicating a pause in thought, but not neccesarily the end of the thought. And paragraphs people, don't forget about them! You have to put a double line between them, because of the way USM reads your submissions, Hit the enter key twice, and it'll space them properly.

As in my pervious rant on this subject, I know I am not without fault, but at least I make an effort to write as legable as possible, and I use off site spellcheckers to correct any words I just can't get. Please people, I beg you, put some effort into your stories, take your time and spell words in an acceptable, readable, manner.

As a side note, and often a lot of people overlook this, the characters ' and " often come off as ’ and “ or ”... this is because the font used here at USM doesn't support the open and close quotation marks, and some forms of the apostrophe. They are just generic marks. Some fonts used in other text editors will put the open "double 6" and close "double 9" that confuse USM, which only uses slightly slanted lines, regardless of open or close. So, after doing a cut/paste from another editor, and submitting it, please read and update your story to eliminate the &# numbers, and put the appropriate punctuation.

Ok, I'll get off my soapbox, put my high horse in the stable, and hopefully I won't have to say more on this subject.

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