One Wank After Another

[coalcube]

A blank assignment is a funny thing, isn't it? When you have it, you don't appreciate it, and when you miss it, it's gone.

Wednesday 10 December: Default deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 17 December: Assignment deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 24 December: Main collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 25 December: Madness collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 1 January: Author reveals, end of event (9pm UTC)

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Comments

Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

En dashes? Ellipses? Single-line paragraphs? Parentheses?

Which formatting quirks would you find most unendurable to vary or forebear from using?

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Parentheses. I've been using them since the days when I wore an onion on my belt (which was the style at the time).

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Stylistic repetition. Couldn’t live a day without it. Not a day.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Good to see you on Coal, Philip Glass.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

semi colons

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

I checked and I apparently average an em-dash every hundred and fifty-ish words. /o\

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

I’d be fine without the em dash, but ONLY because I’m a Commonwealth coalie and use spaced en dashes instead. Take away my en dash and I don’t think I’d be able to write.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Lowercase titles. I would insta-default if someone DNW'd lapslock titles.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

I would personally find parentheses really hard to skip.

But single-line paragraphs would probably be a dealbreaker and don't feel like a reasonable DNW to me. Most of my paragraphs are longer, but sometimes a brief dialogue line or action description really shouldn't be smushed with the following or next paragraph, so the only way to make it not single-line would be to add unnecessary words to the line itself.

Also, from a technical point of view, there is no fixed line width, so "single line" doesn't mean anything.

En dashes? Ellipses? Single-line paragraphs? Parentheses?

^ This is not a single line paragraph on the phone I'm typing this. It probably is a single-line paragraph on my laptop. But some stuff that's a multi-line paragraph on my laptop will be a single-line paragraph for people with a different screen resolution.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Line as in sentences.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Easier to enforce, but still not a DNW I would want to deal with as an author.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

What's the difference between using em dashes and en dashes?

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

I have multiple weapons in my on-going campaign to create as many long-ass sentences as I can - parentheses, ellipses, colons, semi-colons, commas, en-dashes, em-dashes - and should one be banished, another shall rise even stronger, fueled by my grief at its loss. Come at me, I say, and try your best; my writing shall smother you under its weight!

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

With absolute sincerity, I hope you're writing for my fave overly-elaborate long-winded nineteenth-century book canon, coalie.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

For real I would be very sad to lose semi-colons, and I don't think anything else could quite make up for them.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

I cannot give up my meaningful ellipses... some significant action just took place during a pause in this sentence and the reader will have to go on inferring what it is, because I'm not going to tell them.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Sentence fragments. Just. No.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Can't really think of anything that would be dramatic tbh unless we start taking away commas.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Chaotic evil mode: just use em-dashes instead of commas.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Vibes-based commas.

If I had a writer who wanted English-class-approved comma usage I would have to default for the first time ever.

Also mixing US and UK usages at random. (Including how I do dashes - )

(Apparently also sentence fragments, based on this comment--)

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Adverbs. Sorry, those are staying. I can cope without the em-dashes, the semicolons, the parentheses, the ellipses, the italics, but I am not giving up adverbs.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Not to be old woman yelling at cloud, but that's just punctuation. Stylistic writing quirks?? We need to stop being so worried about everything being "something".

It's fine. Feast on 'em. No rules.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

+1

From another old woman yelling at cloud: Distinctive writing styles in fiction are good. "Prose should be invisible" my ass. It's fiction, not a user manual.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

+2

Conversely, there's no punctuation other than full stops where I'd be that thrown off if someone doesn't want them. One long unpunctuated sentence is probably my line.

Re: Your stylistic quirks too precious to give up

[(Anonymous)]

Definitely the heavy use of the em dash. You'll pry them out of my cold, dead hands.