Re: CHAT: The Conlang Instinct

Quoth J. Barefoot:
> What is your personal writing style like in your native language?
> Does it ever get you into trouble, i.e., do pedantic proofreaders ever
> give you grief about perfectly grammatical sentences that run to five
> clauses or more?
I generally write with a fairly colloquial style... this gets me into
trouble when I'm writing academic papers (they tend not to like phrases
like "raising the bar", "clobber", "trounce", "swamps", preferring the
more formal (boring!) "raising expectations", "overwrite", "greatly
improves upon", and "overwhelms". :)  But you do what you gotta, I
guess.

Another style thing that I have problems with is breaking up clauses.
Frequently I find that I have three to five closely related clauses;
I can't break them up completely into sentences, or it'd be too choppy.
But neither can I string them along into one big sentence.  The usual
result is that half (at least!) of my sentences tend to have two
clauses, broken up by a semicolon, dash, colon or ellipsis... and the
sentence boundaries are a tad arbitrary.  I try to break them up as
best I can, but it seems so artificial, since in speaking I'd just
string them together.  Oh well. ;)

--
-=-Don Blaheta-=-=-dpb@cs.brown.edu-=-=-<http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/>-=-
A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program
in than some that do.                           -- Dennis M. Ritchie