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Old 10-06-2012, 08:22 AM   #1
VydorScope
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13 Little-Known Punctuation Marks We Should Be Using

What do you think?

13 Little-Known Punctuation Marks We Should Be Using
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/arc...#ixzz28WMOtHjc
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Old 10-06-2012, 10:43 AM   #2
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If they're little known then the readers won't know them - and they're hard to look up in a dictionary, even if you wanted to distract your reader long enough to do that. Even the humble semi-colon gets a bad-rap with some readers. (And mostly I just see those in the article as another form of adverb )

ETA: Interesting link though, thanks.

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Old 10-06-2012, 12:22 PM   #3
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Haha the exclamation comma & question comma are so epic. Now I don't have to end my sentence by using them

Last edited by rlowe; 10-06-2012 at 12:33 PM.
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Old 10-06-2012, 02:50 PM   #4
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I don't think their unicode glyphs (barring the alternate sarcasm mark) are supported by most readers.
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Old 10-07-2012, 02:43 AM   #5
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I think the interrobang is the only one that readers would understand. People already do use the two-character equivalent, "?!".

The rhetorical question mark could possibly be of some use, but readers wouldn't understand it. I don't think it would be of much use, as it's usually pretty clear when a question is rhetorical. And just because a question is rhetorical doesn't mean it shouldn't be answered. A rhetorical question is often used to make a statement, and if that statement is flawed, one way to expose that flaw is to answer the question?

The others, I don't see a lot of use for them, even if people could be taught them.
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Old 10-07-2012, 02:50 AM   #6
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The exclamation comma, irony mark and interrobang are all ones that I wish were used more often.
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Old 10-07-2012, 06:07 AM   #7
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I can tell you that Cormac doesn't like them.

I actually use ?! and some others in personal writing but not for fiction publication. Why risk the confusion?
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Old 10-07-2012, 10:24 PM   #8
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Interesting. But what is the point of copyrighting a mark? Firstly, that's something that makes nobody use it, and secondly, the entire point with marks is that they shall be copied in the text
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Old 10-08-2012, 02:42 AM   #9
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I think that the purpose of an orthography is to communicate.

If a symbol has a meaning unclear to the receiver, it is not helpful.

It might be more interesting to discuss at what point an author would consider putting a in a text. This and similar symbols, although not in, e.g., English, now have meaning to a large part of the population.
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Old 10-08-2012, 03:25 AM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by derangedhermit View Post
I think that the purpose of an orthography is to communicate.

If a symbol has a meaning unclear to the receiver, it is not helpful.

It might be more interesting to discuss at what point an author would consider putting a in a text. This and similar symbols, although not in, e.g., English, now have meaning to a large part of the population.
In one of my books I insert a series of emails; in such a context I would not have been adverse to using such symbols. I think that, at least the very basic ones, are widely enough known to be acceptable in the right context - but as it turned out I didn't need them. (I deemed that they would, in my situation, have been like redundant adverbs, describing something that was hopefully obvious in the text.)

And while the graphic symbols are easy to recognise, would they appear as graphics in the ebook or as ':' followed by ')' or '-)'. Which brings up the second point. As text, I had always drawn a smiley as ":-)" but more and more places are like this forum where it has been abbreviated to ":" followed by ")". So if the symbol is going to show as text you have to decide which is the form the reader will most readily recognise.
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Old 10-08-2012, 04:32 AM   #11
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I like the idea, but the problem is that many of these marks are simply too obscure to be useful, some of them are copyrighted, and most importantly, only few of them have actually been allocated Unicode points:

INTERROBANG ‽
ASTERISM ⁂
ARABIC QUESTION MARK ؟ ؟
REVERSED QUESTION MARK &x2e2e;

AFAIK, only Kindles support these marks out of the box; you'd probably have to embed a font to use them in your ebooks.

Last edited by Doitsu; 10-08-2012 at 03:56 PM.
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Old 11-01-2012, 01:11 PM   #12
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There are way too many keys on the keyboard already, without adding these!
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Old 11-01-2012, 03:13 PM   #13
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There are way too many keys on the keyboard already, without adding these!
Nailed. It.
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Old 11-02-2012, 07:18 AM   #14
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I have enough trouble figuring out where the commas go.
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Old 11-02-2012, 07:19 AM   #15
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I have enough trouble figuring out where the commas go.
They, go, after, every, pause, so, write, like, William, Shatner, speaks.
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