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April 10, 2011
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what is an acceptable amount of semicolons?
i feel like i use them too often; 31 semicolons in 492 sentences seems like many. 6.3% of my sentences have semicolons in them.
as opposed to the hound of the baskervilles, which has 1.5%.
i'm not in poor company, though. 47.2% of sentences moby dick contain semicolons. that is quite a few semicolons for a 200,000-something-word book.

i wish i could write something that long. someday, dearies, someday. i'll get there.

unrelated: if i ever get a twitter account i will write 140-character haiku and post them.
gnomically.

my livejournal is [link]
my main account is ~rachaelwrites
my formspring is [link]
  • Mood: Tired
  • Listening to: Burning Up--Ladytron
  • Watching: CSI:
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:iconjulij90809:
~JuliJ90809 Apr 10, 2011  Student Writer
i WAY overuse "dash-interjection-dash"es as halie calls them. i have to police literally everything that i write in order to make sure i don't put two sentences with interjections like that in a row, or even close to each other. i once wrote a poem, without realizing it, where every third line or so had an emdash. it was vaguely sickening.

also commas, my teachers always yell at me for overusing them.
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:iconconsolecadet:
agckh, me too.
it's so easy to fall into the habit of very similar sentences.

commas. . .so useful for run-on sentences that make my dad yell at me XD
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:iconjulij90809:
~JuliJ90809 Apr 11, 2011  Student Writer
i can't even tell what's a run-on sentence anymore XP
i usually figure they're okay as long as you can still tell what the main point of the sentence is.
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:iconconsolecadet:
me neither OTL
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:iconalapip:
*alapip Apr 10, 2011  Hobbyist Writer
...my downfall... is ellipses...
in case you hadn't guessed -
also the connecting dash -
for a pause slightly longer...
than a boring old comma.

sigh... ...
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:iconconsolecadet:
ah, ellipses. . .an old friend of mine.
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:iconalapip:
*alapip Apr 10, 2011  Hobbyist Writer
...[i forgot my brackets]...
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:iconconsolecadet:
i love brackets! they are so great for parenthetical interjections
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:iconalapip:
*alapip Apr 11, 2011  Hobbyist Writer
yupyupyup - [yes!]
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