A hodge-podge of languages.
Sep. 14th, 2005 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allanaWhile trying to find out if British English puts a full-stop after title abbreviations (Mr, Mrs, Ms and so on), I've discovered that I'm writing in an interesting hodge-podge of languages.
* I always spell-check for British English.
* Yet I always use American dialogue punctuation and follow their quotation mark rules.
* I merrily ignore all the disapproving looks over comma splices, as they're quite standard in British English.
* I also use a nice mixture of verb forms, depending on my mood.
Having realised that, it's tempered with the realisation that language is fluid. Flicking through a Jeffrey Deaver book which happens to be sitting beside me, I note that he uses single quote marks for dialogue (UK), yet punctuates them in the US style. Interesting.
If I do end up going for a proofreading course I shall have a lot of bad habits to break, I think!!
In other news--through the awesome power of Rockfic chat, I finished a WIP. It's been hanging around my hard-drive, making mournful faces at me for months. Since the beginning of May, in fact. Now, I have another nine WIPs which I'd quite like to get done, so I'll be dragging anyone I can lay my hands on into chat. Maybe we can recreate the magic!
* I always spell-check for British English.
* Yet I always use American dialogue punctuation and follow their quotation mark rules.
* I merrily ignore all the disapproving looks over comma splices, as they're quite standard in British English.
* I also use a nice mixture of verb forms, depending on my mood.
Having realised that, it's tempered with the realisation that language is fluid. Flicking through a Jeffrey Deaver book which happens to be sitting beside me, I note that he uses single quote marks for dialogue (UK), yet punctuates them in the US style. Interesting.
If I do end up going for a proofreading course I shall have a lot of bad habits to break, I think!!
In other news--through the awesome power of Rockfic chat, I finished a WIP. It's been hanging around my hard-drive, making mournful faces at me for months. Since the beginning of May, in fact. Now, I have another nine WIPs which I'd quite like to get done, so I'll be dragging anyone I can lay my hands on into chat. Maybe we can recreate the magic!
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-14 01:26 pm (UTC)**sniff**
I can never get Chat to work on my home computer. I am sad.
And I'm like you, my writing style is all over the fucking place. I shudder to think of what a proofreader would do to it. I try to run all my stuff thru a grammar checker first, when I remember to do so.
Glad to hear you got your WIP done :)