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ShardPhoenix comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7 - Less Wrong
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Hi Eliezer, one minor issue I have with this (awesome) story is the punctuation. In particular, you often use commas when other punctuation might read better. Here are a few examples from chapter 68:
1.
Would read better as:
2.
Would read better as:
3.
Would read better as:
I get the impression that you often do this in order to create a sense of rushing/urgency, and it mostly works, but other times it reads awkwardly. It's particularly noticeable at the beginnings of chapters.
Caveat: I'm not a grammarian so I'm not sure if my edits here are actually more correct, but they read better to me.
I'm no expert, but I'm confident in my own knowledge here; your edits are more correct by the prescriptive standards of English. They also read better to me too, although may I suggest some semicolons sometimes?
I agree that semicolons are awesome, and one would probably be the best choice for sentence two.
Both colons and semi-colons are known to break the flow of writing. Dashes generally flow better than semi-colons. This is something I've found after writing many pieces (often with lots of semi-colons, which my natural style has a lot of) on a peer review writing-site and having reviewers tell me - 'x sentence doesn't flow well' for basically every sentence with a semi-colon.
They work better in non-fic writing, where the flow can be more formal.
A substantial disadvantage of semi-colons is simply that they're rare. If a small but significant portion of your readers don't read them as you intend you're better off finding another way.
It's a pity though, because if I were writing for perfect clones of me, they'd often be the best choice.
I use semicolons a lot more when writing on Less Wrong (and other places where intelligence is high) than on many other places.