I only read the premise in the first paragraph of Shellshark’s blog post, because I wanted to avoid reading it and being like “oh yeah I do that too,” therefore I have decided to do the same thing, and list some of the thing commonly found in my writing—according to me.
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This is not that uncommon—I hope—but there is a lot of vocabulary I repeat a lot of the time. words like “really”, “so”, “kinda”, “though”, “a lot” are found quite often in most of my blog posts, I’ve been using some dictionaries and looking for synonyms in my last few posts where I just say “this anime good” and “this videogame good” a lot of the time though.
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When I write reviews I sometimes feel bad that I don’t have as much to say about something I enjoyed, I just say “it was awesome” and such but I think I could be better at doing analogies and describing the feelings I get from them instead of using synonyms of “neat.”
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I barely use commas sometimes, this is something I realized when writing some of my previous post and then going to a spellchecking website. There were lots of missing commas, at least according to the site I used, that should be before or after words like “but” and “so” and “and.”
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Tons of wrong words when it comes to referring to plurals or singular things. Especially when doing “there is” or “that is” when it should have been “there are” or “those are.” I still think I’m pretty good at using the proper words but it slips somewhat often. Notice how there’s no comma before that “but.” 🤣
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I almost never use hyphens to join words, I actually did it in my last few posts again, because I decided to see what a spellchecker had to say for it, but using a hyphen in “top-notch” feels sacrilegious to me…
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Now, using em dashes “—” is something I quite like! I’m not sure where I started using them more often on my posts, but I like that, at least with Jekyll and my markdown parser (kramdown) typing --- turns into an em dash ~automagically! ✨
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I like to use links, but I always struggle to know where to put them. I don’t like to use a link on a single word like “here” but I also don’t really want to spell the titles of whatever I’m linking directly. So I try to balance things out.
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When I start to list things in a sentence, I am never sure on how to stop. In Spanish, using “etc.” is very common, but for some reason I don’t like it in English, I have used it a few times, but I prefer to try and find the some clever sentence that ends things well. Also I use the Oxford comma depending on vibes.
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When I use emojis, I always finish the sentence and put them after the last period, I think it’s more elegant that way. 🙂↕
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I also really like to use exclamation marks, but sometimes I feel weird about using them alongside em dashes!—but who cares right?—I tend to finish my paragraphs with them as well!
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I barely use pictures and when I do I like to add a little caption to them, but these past few blog posts I’ve started to add some more pics, and I think I like them when they are more like banners, horizontal and right after a heading, I vibe with that, and I hate the vertical ones, I could dabble with my CSS but they really have no place imo.
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I tend to assume people just get what I’m talking about, so when I go back and read some of my posts I wonder what was I thinking? just look at the random intro of this post about fetching full articles in FreshRSS, poor @ssafar! 😭
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Breaking paragraphs is something I still struggle with, I always do it after the fact, I write as much as I like in my draft, and by the time I realize I have been going on with the same topic for like 10 lines of uninterrumpted text. I also can end up using a lot of commas and not enough periods, making it harder to grasp what is even going, the worst is when it happens in the middle of a listing, like in this case, because the paragraph is long, but I don’t want to break it up because it looks weird to me.
It’s possible to break the paragraph while keeping the same margin of the previous listed paragraph, but it still feels wrong.
Whatever! I think there’s a couple of extra mannerisms I could mention, but being kinda lazy is also a bit of a mannerism for me, and I’ll honor it by not finishing this properly.
