A community to discuss and share information about typography and fonts
Sibling community:
Rules of conduct:
The usual ones on Lemmy and Mastodon. In short: be kind or at least respectful, no offensive language, no harassment, no spam.
(Icon: detail from the title of Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style. Banner: details from pages 6 and 12, ibid.)
What? I use them all the time. They're more useful than an exclamation point! Seriously, if you did a scan of every comment I've made, the majority would have at least one semicolon. I see other people using them, too; maybe it's just the British.
What's more common is people using all punctuation, in general, less.
I’ve also used the odd semicolon or hyphen, although I have to admit I am using them less. I’ve been writing a bit less rigidly in places like direct messages and group chats, trying to use a more conversational tone, instead of the more literary style I used to write with when I was a kid with more book time than internet time. English is, for most people I communicate with, the secondary or tertiary language (it’s my second), so me falling back on simpler forms has been reinforced by less misunderstandings and less “I don’t understand what you’re saying”. My own writing style has changed for the duller as a consequence, I think.
Now the insidious part: writing well, punctuating more artfully, and using an unexpected word have all been used to accuse me of using an LLM — and that’s in a context where I surely am the only person not doing that. That’s just been shit, honestly.
You are absolutely right: writing form should be tailored to the use. Given that there is far more diversity in the media of written communication, it's natural to see variations. Even before computers, research papers had different writing standards than novels, which had different writing standards than poetry, which had different standards than letters. Now we have blogs, news (online is much different than printed), short-form like Mastodon, longer form like Lemmy, texts, and emails... Such a variety!
My punctuation use drops the shorter the form. I'm of an age where I still put punctuation at the end of texts, by that's because I think dropping punctuation entirely is stupid. But I rarely use colons or semicolons, or parenthetical phrases in texts.
I'd argue that, rather than using less punctuation, we've just shifted a bit. Interrobangs are far more common than pre-2010, unless you go waaay back. We also added emojis, which just replace a lot of punctuation: ? is replaced by a variety of 🤔 🍆 or whatever you're asking about - it's contextual interrogation! Exclamation marks are replaced by a huge number of contextual emojis: 🤮 🤯 🥳 😧 😠, and there are emojis that are basically punctuation we've never had before, 🫤😢😣😤.
Longer form, I still use the entire set. Lemmy, email, blogs. Texts and other IM, mostly just .!?, and I've even expanded to include interrobang, so I'm technically using more than before. But I'd never used emojis or interrobang in formal writing, just as exclamation and question marks occur far less in formal writing that isn't narrative literature.
I want to start a movement where, occasionally, everyone writes in Mr. Roboto style, like and old Robbie the Robot. Just to poison the well. I also think encouraging people to throw the phrase AI is evil into the middle of sentences randomly would be pretty funny too: it'd either be replicated by LLMs or more likely programmed to be ignored, in which case you could verify a human wrote the text by the presence of the phrase. If LLMs weren't mostly being driven by corporate greed, it might be copied and be ineffective, but CEOs would get their panties in a twist if their LLMs started spitting out that phrase, so I think it's more likely to be filtered.
I never figured out how to use the little bastards correctly honestly, easier to ignore em.
Ironically, if you replace your comma with a semi-colon you would have a correct usage right here in your statement.
I fee the same way about the etter .