… , because it feels like sentiment clarification must be included and tone tags and emoji can’t cover all possible ways a reader might find to still misinterpret a statement. (or the statement carries a hidden meaning that I never realize existed, or I have made a fool of myself for accidentally quoting something someone has said in a completely unrelated situation and somehow I still think providing more context would fix that)
I am feeling perceived. Bonus points if the amount of side clauses makes you reach for both commas, parentheses and dashes in a single sentence just to keep things varied.
How many nested layers of parentheses and separators can we get to?
When I do a re-read (or a re-re-read, because communicating precisely to larger groups takes more preparation) I try to split convoluted braindumps with too many complications into separate sentences or even paragraphs. When I don’t… it’s sometimes a wild ride to reconstruct the brain tangents that led to the written sentence.
We can always go full David Foster Wallace and start burying side clauses in footnotes, too!
I am glad there are other people who are in the same boat (situation) xD
I’ve noticed myself using a lot of parenthesis, sort of to better represent my thoughts as I’m trying to put them into words. Lately, I’ve tried to use them less, because I’m not sure how well it comes across to things such as screen readers – or just in general. So now I use dashes instead.
Best to use both for the ultimate experience - if you can handle it (or use a comma instead)
I tend to use it when a comma is already in use in that same sentence – or if I’m trying to be fancy.
What you want to say (explain a bit more {tell how you came to this conclusion [reference an article]}).
Then I go back and replace them with periods or commas for normies.
The amount of times I write out a sentence and add so much in the brackets that I end up reworking the whole thing is sadly higher than I would like. Oftentimes for something I know I’m probably overthinking or doing more of an info dump on than I really need to (or should even bother with since everyone probably stopped reading already).
Case in point. =)
Semicolons are also great shit.
Yes, everyone should use more semicolons… so I don’t look like a pretentious ass when I use one.
I’ve just embraced me being a prentenious ass. It goes well with me speaking using references to persons or research papers.
I do that too. Sometimes I’ll stop and just rewrite the sentence. If it’s work and I’m strapped for time or feeling stupid/lazy, I’ll just ask gpt4 to clarify what I’m saying.
Goddammit lmao (I do this a lot.)
