If I could contribute a new punctuation mark to society, and force it into acceptance, it would be a quotation mark with a period directly beneath it. I’m so sick of trying to decide whether it looks weirder to have the quotation mark before or after the period. At this point I really only care about the look of it. I don’t give a hoot about which one is technically correct. Those rules evolve, and some of the world’s greatest books are full of misused punctuation.
People already complain that I put two spaces after a period. But that’s how I was taught, and it’s too difficult to change that now. If I ever publish an actual book, I will attempt to find software that removes the extra space, but I refuse to actually type differently. It would take me months to unlearn that habit, at which point the Powers That Be would suddenly declare two spaces to be the official norm. The people who think they’re in charge of grammar are a bunch of stuffed shirts, anyway, with no vision of the future.
If you’ve read a lot of my blogs, you may have noticed that I rarely indent paragraphs, and just put an extra space between them instead. This is how I prefer to write, and for me it’s easier to read as well. Before the invention of computers, the extra spaces probably would have been considered a waste of paper. But now, when so many people are reading their books on tablets? I honestly think this is the future of writing.
Anyway, hi.
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