#funsies as in. in russiаn it's ridiculously easy to animate the inanimate bc of it and give train stations hats that they can lose to winds

[superconductivebean]

#1539

I disdain and hate Engish dialogue punctuation. I'll explain.

With M-dashes for dialogue and quotation marks for thoughts and inner monologues, the text is objectively a lot easier to read without actually reading the script. You're aware of what to expect, grammatically, and can adjust to the author's pace this way.

I am a fast reader, it's all vital for me and it's a generally good exercise to try and implement grammar as a pace marker.

But the way English-language allows for random placements of the spoken speech is aggravating; it's not, technically, the language's fault, but I totally understand why people constantly feel lost or don't understand the system completely. I don't understand it either, and in a sense, I reject and resent it.

How are you supposed not to if everything looks exactly the same?

Especially when it allows this to exist:

"A lengthy line of dialogue", character A says. "A line that belongs to its own paragraph and is poorly indicated, if at all", character B adds. [Unrelated things are happening here and it's not clear why they're not their own paragraph.] "Line." [who said that???]

Bonus point if there is no indication and the reader is expected to utilise the power of cosmos to understand who said what lest they don't want to reread an entire scene multiple times to simply be able to digest it.

It's partly author's fault. A paragraph is a concealed thought, it should be lone in most cases, but intertwined with everything else. We as authors should always remember this.

But the language allows to mush these thoughts together. It creates a sense of the flow, yes, to write like this; but then its reading is done backwards. You have to look at the end of the next sentence to know who said it, then read the line, then read everything assembled together, and even if your eyes were trained to do that in seconds, it's tiring and unnecessary. Cute but rocky flow, perhaps you shouldn't write like this, maybe it's better to opt out for something like this:

"Line." "Line?" "Line x10." "Oh. Line then."

If a paragraph is a concealed thought, the thought can also be a compound of smaller thoughts. Yet they shouldn't be convoluted or smooched together too tightly they're nigh impossible to untangle?

With M-dashes, this would look like this:

— A lengthy line of dialogue, — character A says. Character B adds: "A line that could still be its own paragraph but now fits as it is clearly marked as an addendum BEFORE the line begins; could be possible with the previous example but is rarely, if ever, structured this way". [Things became their own paragraph.] — Line. — Still unclear who said that but at least it is its own thing now.

And this is one of two cases when "" aren't used for thoughts and inner dialogues; another one is when your entire dialogue is back and forth and can be presented as its own paragraph.

It also makes the text read extremely fast because you take in the sentence structure first and then populate it with words and senses.

I'm angry at this, evidently. A lot of thought goes into where it should not belong—ttp it feels like a honest downgrade from Russiаn. The punctuation should be the rail regulating of reading, not a labyrinth or a some kind of twister game.