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Comment by diN0bot | Hacker News Reader

what i've always wondered is how to handle apostrophes, parentheses and punctuation. it's not what is Right, it's what will look right to the audience.

i love "hello world." ??

i love programs (especially hello world). ??

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If you're serious, which is likely since the internet is worldwide, I have some advice that can help you get started. Also, I'm going to believe that your lack of capitals is a conscious choice. A method of saving time... over time.

Besides apostrophes, commas, and question marks, I have always considered special punctuation as a kind of cheat. If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought.

One exercise I have employed, when organizing my writing, has been to write without punctuation and in lines, every thought on a new line. Like a poem. Punctuation is essentially there to separate these thoughts, so you can start by adding the periods, then arranging your thoughts into a paragraph.

Use of special punctuation, in my opinion, is mostly a means of controlling rhythm. And the ability to ease into the rhythm of writing is largely dependent on a reader's, or writer's, familiarity with the language.

So, I would focus on periods and commas first, until you have a good familiarity with the language. That is my advice to you.

"If you're using special punctuation, there is almost always a more eloquent way of articulating your sentence/thought."

Thank you. You've just fixed my writing style. I owe you a large drink.

(No, seriously. I use semi-colons, colons and em-dashes -- pretentious and pedantic though they be; fun though it be to be better educated than my audience -- entirely too often: see? With the above quotation in my arsenal, I shall cease forthwith. Consider me indebted to you for any clarity I may thus gain.)

Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, and adopted a rule that every time I notice myself writing parentheses I stop and consider (1) whether I can just delete them or replace them with commas and (2) whether I can get rid of them in some other way. I find that maybe 90% of the time this leads to an improvement. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the same applies to other relatively unusual kinds of punctuation.

Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought".

Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-).

Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought"

Which is fitting, since I consider the use of special punctuation a cheat. I don't hold myself above cheating all the time, and I did cheat. It helps to save time, since a single paragraph can be refined endlessly.

You have to have flexible standards.

"Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, ... (1) ... (2) ..."

When I try to eliminate parentheses and similar parentheticals, I write separate sentences if possible.

Ho ho. Entirely different sort of parentheses, of course. But yes, the sentence might have been improved by splitting it up so that it didn't need numbering. [EDITED after looking again at what I wrote before, to add:] Or just by removing the numbers.

Oh ... Sorry, but I was absolutely not critiquing your sentence. I specifically was not objecting to your use of parenthesized numbering.

I was trying to jump off from your solution to reducing parentheses, to say how I handle the same problem.

In an informal setting like this, I see no problem at all with casual or bumpy grammar.

My apologies, I should have included the text of your points in the quote.

"Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-)."

This is why everyone should learn Python.

What? Python has way too many parentheses. Why should I have to write foo() to call foo? That's what I want to do with it 99% of the time. Ruby has it right.

It still has many improvements over C. Compare:

void func(x) { if (a == b) { do(c); do(d); } else{ do(e); } } vs:

def func(x): if a == b: do(c) do(d) else: do(e)

I write the first as

void func(int x) { if (a==b) do(c),do(d); else do(e); }

Because how are you going to refer to foo (and not the result of foo) otherwise?

Haskell has it right. And Scheme and Forth of course.

I have the same problem. I usually find that not only can I remove the parenthesis, but I can often remove the entire phrase. Usually it turns out that they were just extraneous things that I found interesting with no real pertinence to the rest of whatever I am writing.

"Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-)."

Use of parens in writing is akin to calling a subroutine in code; you're making something of a detour, but coming right back.

As in writing, I found that if a method is getting busy trying to express many different things then I need to break it up.

Same here. I overuse parenthetical statements like crazy. Once, long ago, I was told that you should only use parenthetical clauses when the sentence will still make sense and give enough information if you were to just delete the clause entirely. So, with that in mind, I'll often just try to delete the parenthetical and move on. If I really care enough about what's between 'em, I'll try to rephrase, maybe by putting it in a new sentence.

Aw, but I love the semicolon; it let's you do CRAZY things!

Many standard rules for punctuation are actually merely the outcome of a need for movable type printing presses to save money and are incoherent in 2009. For instance, standard punctuation would have me write: Please append the extension ".txt." For clarity, I'd re-write: Please append the extension ".txt" to the file. Much of this comes from the notion that punctuation resides insides the quote marks. But the rule comes from a practice fueled by function: the period and comma were the two most breakable tiles for printers, and having them inside another tile meant they were far less likely to break. I increasingly find myself quoting text exactly, and I place punctuation not in the original outside the quotation.

But I also use "they" as a first person singular gender-neutral pronoun: I don't know the author of that article, but they certainly did a good job. I guess I'm a grammatical progressive.

More reasonably: if you were typesetting something carefully, you’d stack the ” close to directly above the . and you’d use a separate typeface or color to set a precise computer string such as `.txt`. In plain text communications, I tend to avoid situations where a string like « ".txt". » might come up, because it’s confusing no matter which side of the quotation marks the period ends up on, and instead use some punctuation like «.txt» or `.txt` to make clear that this is a technical word whose precise character arrangement matters, especially since the " character is itself often meaningful in such strings.

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