musicalman
Well-Known Member
Hi all,
So first I should give a bit of background, so that those who think I'm just weird will know where I'm coming from and why I am different.
Basically I am blind and grew up learning braille, but as I went through school, I used braille less and less, and started using my IPhone and laptop more, with adaptive software that speaks. Such software does have braille support, outputting to braille displays (kinda like computer monitors for the blind), but I don't use those because a laptop and phone are more portable, and I can speed the speech up to faster rates than I can read braille.
When I was in school learning to read and write, I was told to end sentences with either a period, question mark or exclamation mark, except for titles where you use title case. Nobody ever told me you could get away with doing any different, and being the type of person who does a lot of what he's told most of the time until directed otherwise, I didn't really question it. Not even when I got on a computer and started typing e-mails and eventually getting into Skype when I was 15-16.
Until my early 20s when I was starting to branch out into forums, Twitter, Discord, and a host of other social media apps to varying degrees, I kinda assumed that all but the laziest of people capitalized the first letter of every sentence, and ended statements with punctuation. Even single words weren't exempt from this rule. If someone for instance asked me if I wanted to do something which I didn't feel like doing, I would literally write "No." Without the quotes obviously. I don't write like this to be a writing snob, it just comes from my desire to produce neat things I guess. There's a certain neatness I perceive from a string of text that could well be a sentence which begins and ends like one. It's more the concept of a proper start and end than it is about good writing.
Most people I talk to don't write messages like me, which I only recently found out. They either omit capitalization, omit that last punctuation mark, or omit both. To be honest, this actually surprised me quite a bit. Now I am not the type of person to judge, so I don't think any less of them. It baffles me and leads to a curiosity about how people decide their standards, but it goes no further.
Another thing, for a time I also avoided abbreviations like the plague, though I like the word lol for some reason and that's stuck with me, but I still don't like saying brb, or btw, because obviously when the messages are read to me, I hear the letters "b r b", or "b t w" which is a little weird to me. And in some cases, such as iirc, the letters aren't read as individual, but strung together into a fake word like "eark." I could make exceptions to this to expand these abbreviations or change them to read in more intuitive ways, but that feels wrong somehow. I'm more lax about it now, mainly because of my compulsion to fit in, but I still feel awkward about it.
I'm pretty sure that if I stuck with braille, no doubt I would've noticed trends sooner, since in braille, punctuation is as clear as it is in print. But when stuff is read to you, punctuation isn't read to you unless you specifically request it most of the time. If I was using braille, odds are that during my first few Skype chats I probably would've begun jumping on the wagon of the majority and started following them, since things I read in braille stick with me more. I think I would still experience some of the same awkwardness, but would find a happy ground that I could eventually accept. But now the extra effort to be semi formal is reflexive and trying to be more casual is painful, so I feel like I will always be less casual than most. That is hard to accept sometimes since throughout my life I have always been an outcast.
I'm not going to make a big deal of it off this thread though, since nobody has made it out to be a bad thing yet, so why should I? In fact, if someone does bring it up, it would be an interesting discussion. If someone hacked into one of my accounts, everyone who had at least had some IM correspondence with me would instantly be able to tell I was hacked. Or would they? That's what stems this curiosity. ?Do these differences even matter to people who actually read print? Or braille for that matter, since I honestly don't know at this stage.
So, I'm interested in any insight you can give after reading all this, but there are a few main points that drew this 5300-character post out of me in the first place.
1. If you are one of the few who is religious about writing complete sentences even in the most informal conversations, why? How pedantic are you about it?
2. Do you find it difficult to change your style from informal to formal? Do you even have a distinction between the two? I don't have a big distinction. I'm not always this wordy, but I always write the same way, perhaps with slightly different word choice when being more formal.
3. Would your attention be drawn if you met a new friend who wrote messages the same way I said I write mine? If you notice that sort of thing, what would be your reaction if any?
Few, that's all I think. So what are your thoughts? And no I promise I will not proof them like an English nazi. That's not at all why I'm here.
So first I should give a bit of background, so that those who think I'm just weird will know where I'm coming from and why I am different.
Basically I am blind and grew up learning braille, but as I went through school, I used braille less and less, and started using my IPhone and laptop more, with adaptive software that speaks. Such software does have braille support, outputting to braille displays (kinda like computer monitors for the blind), but I don't use those because a laptop and phone are more portable, and I can speed the speech up to faster rates than I can read braille.
When I was in school learning to read and write, I was told to end sentences with either a period, question mark or exclamation mark, except for titles where you use title case. Nobody ever told me you could get away with doing any different, and being the type of person who does a lot of what he's told most of the time until directed otherwise, I didn't really question it. Not even when I got on a computer and started typing e-mails and eventually getting into Skype when I was 15-16.
Until my early 20s when I was starting to branch out into forums, Twitter, Discord, and a host of other social media apps to varying degrees, I kinda assumed that all but the laziest of people capitalized the first letter of every sentence, and ended statements with punctuation. Even single words weren't exempt from this rule. If someone for instance asked me if I wanted to do something which I didn't feel like doing, I would literally write "No." Without the quotes obviously. I don't write like this to be a writing snob, it just comes from my desire to produce neat things I guess. There's a certain neatness I perceive from a string of text that could well be a sentence which begins and ends like one. It's more the concept of a proper start and end than it is about good writing.
Most people I talk to don't write messages like me, which I only recently found out. They either omit capitalization, omit that last punctuation mark, or omit both. To be honest, this actually surprised me quite a bit. Now I am not the type of person to judge, so I don't think any less of them. It baffles me and leads to a curiosity about how people decide their standards, but it goes no further.
Another thing, for a time I also avoided abbreviations like the plague, though I like the word lol for some reason and that's stuck with me, but I still don't like saying brb, or btw, because obviously when the messages are read to me, I hear the letters "b r b", or "b t w" which is a little weird to me. And in some cases, such as iirc, the letters aren't read as individual, but strung together into a fake word like "eark." I could make exceptions to this to expand these abbreviations or change them to read in more intuitive ways, but that feels wrong somehow. I'm more lax about it now, mainly because of my compulsion to fit in, but I still feel awkward about it.
I'm pretty sure that if I stuck with braille, no doubt I would've noticed trends sooner, since in braille, punctuation is as clear as it is in print. But when stuff is read to you, punctuation isn't read to you unless you specifically request it most of the time. If I was using braille, odds are that during my first few Skype chats I probably would've begun jumping on the wagon of the majority and started following them, since things I read in braille stick with me more. I think I would still experience some of the same awkwardness, but would find a happy ground that I could eventually accept. But now the extra effort to be semi formal is reflexive and trying to be more casual is painful, so I feel like I will always be less casual than most. That is hard to accept sometimes since throughout my life I have always been an outcast.
I'm not going to make a big deal of it off this thread though, since nobody has made it out to be a bad thing yet, so why should I? In fact, if someone does bring it up, it would be an interesting discussion. If someone hacked into one of my accounts, everyone who had at least had some IM correspondence with me would instantly be able to tell I was hacked. Or would they? That's what stems this curiosity. ?Do these differences even matter to people who actually read print? Or braille for that matter, since I honestly don't know at this stage.
So, I'm interested in any insight you can give after reading all this, but there are a few main points that drew this 5300-character post out of me in the first place.
1. If you are one of the few who is religious about writing complete sentences even in the most informal conversations, why? How pedantic are you about it?
2. Do you find it difficult to change your style from informal to formal? Do you even have a distinction between the two? I don't have a big distinction. I'm not always this wordy, but I always write the same way, perhaps with slightly different word choice when being more formal.
3. Would your attention be drawn if you met a new friend who wrote messages the same way I said I write mine? If you notice that sort of thing, what would be your reaction if any?
Few, that's all I think. So what are your thoughts? And no I promise I will not proof them like an English nazi. That's not at all why I'm here.
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