“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.
“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement.
“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”
Dear Tumblr,
Does anyone know why this is? It really bothers me and I find myself actively breaking this rule all the time, because I feel like the comma often weakens the dialog involved–only to be corrected later, literally every time I show a piece to anyone. I am generally OK with bowing to grammatical structures needed for clarity but this one is really arbitrary to me and I can’t see why putting a period at the end of a dialog that, were it a first person narration, you would put a period after. No one ever seems confused by what I mean, they just say that it is incorrect and correct me. Is there something I am missing here?
Confused Grammar Disciple
English BA here.
So, when you use the period, it essentially denotes that the dialog is separate from whatever the action is the character is performing, whereas using a comma signifies that the dialog and action are happening at the same time or in conjunction with one another. It helps bring clarity to the reader imagining the scene.
If that helps.
“Right now I’m providing an example of how if the dialogue’s part of the action you should use a comma,” I type while sitting in my bed. If I had used a period there, ‘I type while sitting in my bed’ would have been an independent thought or action.
“This is another example of how if the action happens after the writing, you use a period.” I put my computer down, stand up, and do a really cool backflip. That was definitely a different thought or action than the dialogue, as well as being sick as hell.
“But if I were to do the backflip while explaining shit I’d definitely use a comma,” I elaborate, backflipping again. I’m a master of doing both exposition and acrobatics at the same time.
“I didn’t do any backflips at all, actually. I was lying to you.” I finish this example and click ‘reblog’.
I could have used this while writing that gd massive fic a few years ago.
9: (truth) How did you meet your best friend? (dare) Refresh your dashboard. Open the blog of the person who posted whatever’s at the top of your dash. Reblog their most recent selfie.
OKAY WHO WANTS TO HEAR THE STORY OF HOW I MET MY WIFE, IT IS LONG. And also kind of fan-ficcy. No, we’re not actually married, nor dating, nor anything else, BUT. @twistedangelsays remains the Laurens to my Hamilton (just…minus the probable sexual relationship). So Laurens and me are in the same Latin class for a W H O L E year and I am kind of a dumb shit even when I’m being smart, so I FAILED TO LEARN HER NAME except for her Latin name and like I don’t really count that as having ‘met’ because I failed to appreciate her awesome. And then my ex-roommate–uh, we’re gonna call her Lee because I’m on a kick and we had a nasty falling out–had a psychotic break (PRO TIP KIDS: you can OD on caffeine, it’s easier than you’d think, and if you have pre-existing psychological issues like anxiety and bipolar, that can go REALLY BAD). Now Lee and Laurens were ALSO friends but I’m an introvert so I STILL HADN’T MET LAURENS, but anyway, I had gotten a rep as The Person Who Solved Shit and also as the only person anyone knew with a grain of first aid training, so NATURALLY one of Lee’s friends brings her to me. Six hour later, I’m exhausted and Lee and I are back from the hospital (FUN TIMES), and I’m not sure who the very helpful blonde was who kept making sure I had space to work with Lee or who made sure I had a phone so that I could contact her and keep everyone updated at the hospital. But I kind of blundered into her and gave her a hug and handed the phone back and went back to my room and fell face-first on my bed. Flash forward a couple months and it’s the start of sophomore year. I go and meet Lee on the first day of school and she has a nice blonde with her, the nice blonde doesn’t introduce herself and I realize I’m supposed to know her name, some dredging through the lake of memory turns up ‘Laurens’ and I do some judicious eavesdropping to make sure I’m right. We had a three hour conversation about how bullshit the public school system is, I haven’t looked back since, we mutually booted Lee to the curb when she turned into a REALLY BAD FRIEND, we’ve lived together almost two years now, and honestly Laurens is the best thing that ever happened to my smol rageful ass.
14: (truth) If you could only wear one outfit for the rest of your life (consisting of clothes you already own), what would it be? (dare) Tag someone you follow who has amazing fashion sense.
Okay, I actually don’t give that much of a shit about my clothes, so here’s my extremely basic truth: one of my nice button-downs because I look like I can kick ass, some jeans because they’re sturdy, my rings and my watch, my combat boots, and my leather coat.
23: (truth) What are your three biggest turn ons, and your three biggest turn offs? (dare) Put your music player on shuffle. Without actually listening to it, write the lyrics to the chorus of the first song.
Turn-ons: that thing where people push up their sleeves and you can watch the tendons shift on the backs of their arms and their hands, a nice laugh attached to an actually funny sense of humor, and raking hands through hair (I just…hands are my thing, and I like touching people’s hair, and putting the two together makes me think about my hands in your hair and that would be real fun, no?)
Turn-offs: uh…it’s too obvious to say ‘touching me without permission,’ right? Yeah. So barring that. Laughing at me for something I care about, being a sexist fuck, or telling me to be more lady-like.
Anonymous asked: 25
25: (truth) What is the last thing you lied about? (dare) Tag three people you want to know better and ask them each three questions about themselves.
Uh, let’s see…I don’t really…lie…much. But I’m also too tired to tag people. Uh. Last time I lied…like, outright untruth? Like, this 100% did not happen, there was no manipulating of the truth or twisting of reality? I don’t fucking know, it was probably a while ago. I’m a professional loopholer and I can turn the truth inside out without ever breaking it once, but I don’t really lie. I am actually exactly the worst person to ask this question of. Oh, hold on, wait, I lied to a friend who’d OD’d on caffeine about still having more of those little packaged espresso shots lying around, that was a while back. I definitely did that.
Anonymous asked: 21
21: (truth) What three fictional characters would you most like to meet? (dare) Write your name down on a piece of paper and draw a quick picture of yourself. Take a photo of it and post it.
WHOA GUYS FICTIONAL CHARACTERS TIME BUCKLE THE FUCK UP.
Jamethiel Priest’s-bane from the Kencyrath Chronicles, those books I keep pitching in all-caps. My all-time fave. Honestly I’d let her beat the shit out of me and I’d probably thank her.
Jareth and/or Sarah Williams from Labyrinth. Beyond the fact that, in retrospect, I was 100% crushing blind on both of them from the time I was four, I just fucking want confirmation that magic is a thing and it’s dangerous and gorgeous and wicked and cruel and wonderful.
Uh…YO, Furiosa. Or Mako Mori. Or Natasha Romanoff. Or Jessica Jones. Or Claire Temple. Or Zoe Alleyene. Look, folks, this is a pretty long list of Badass Ladies I Want To Get Drunk With.
WOOO PEOPLE ARE DOING THE THING. All right, I’m fine, I’m an adult, I got this.
1: (truth) Who was your first major celebrity crush? (dare) Put your music player on shuffle and post the first five songs.
Okay, I just put myself through Hamilton on shuffle, that was traumatic, truth it is. Uh…yeah, so, my first celebrity crush was David Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King. I was probably four. When I say Labyrinth was formative, I’m serious about that. I’d say don’t judge me, but honestly I have no regrets, do your worst.
19: (truth) What is the first thing you remember having to keep secret? (dare) Tag five bloggers who you associate with being obsessed with something particular, and list what each of them is obsessed with.
Uh…don’t have the brain power to do the blogs thing, so uncomfortable truth time it is. Pretty sure the first time I ever kept something secret it was my screaming terror of cicadas. I was maybe three? My grandfather decided that I was going to like bugs if I was going to be interested in science and he started giving me dead ones…like…as a collection, I guess. I refused to touch the cicada and he made me hold it in my hands until I could do it on my own. He still doesn’t know how much I hate them, and he never saw me scared again, even though he kept giving me dead cicadas every time he saw me until I was about nine. Cicadas now give me severe panic attacks. It’s awesome. …my family’s kind of a piece of work.
Well, that got grim fast. Uh, let’s see, what’s more cheerful…I fucking crushed it on my Organic Chemistry exam this morning and I got into a crazy-prestigious fellowship this summer, and my dad’s up here to collect me after my physics exam and we went out to dinner tonight and it was great, and I’m getting to do my senior thesis on battlefield medicine, which is SUPER FUCKING COOL. Smile, guys, you have a 100% survival rate of your life so far.
Anonymous asked: 26, 24, and 16.
ALL RIGHT, big fan of this procrastinating thing, who needs to study physics.
16: (truth) What is your dream job? (dare) Post the four most recent pictures in your camera roll.
So, I’ll do truth because my camera roll has nothing but pictures of IR spectra on it right now and I love y’all too much to do that to you. My dream job if I really had my pick would be “make lots of money as an author, open ACTUALLY FREE clinic for people who can’t afford the hospital, work as ER doctor and have free rein to yell at my friends for being dumbasses.” Also I would like to make enough money to foster LGBT kids who get kicked out of their house. Barring a financial miracle, though, I’d like to work as a doctor in the emergency department of a Trauma 1 hospital in a big city. Wow, that makes me sound like a great person. Don’t let it fool you, I’m an asshole.
24: (truth) If you could only own five material objects (not counting life necessities like food/water/a house/etc) what would they be? (dare) Put your music player on shuffle. Post what the first three songs are, and for each one, tag a blog that the song reminds you of.
I’m gonna do the dare because…my books. I could not pick only five. (Do books count as life necessities? That would be a tidy cop out.) I’m listening to Hamilton, so…I’m gonna put it on shuffle. Fucking pray for me.
Aaron Burr, Sir: My wife @twistedangelsays, because I am the smol, loudmouthed, opinionated, angry Hamilton to her patient, manipulative Burr. We have no intentions to murder each other. Also because she and I call each other Hamilton and Laurens, because every-damn-body thinks we’re sleeping together. (WE’RE NOT.)
Wait for It: Uh…oh, god, I don’t know. I kinda want to say notbecauseofvictories because IT IS GORGEOUS AND HER WRITING IS GORGEOUS and because they give me that same gut-punch of beauty. But I’m too shy to tag her, because she is very impressive. So. Instead, @im-lost-but-not-gone, because my mom has NOT HEARD THIS SONG YET and she is going to LOVE IT and she is JUST LIKE THIS SONG and guys, she’s so cool, for real.
Best of Wives and Best of Women: Well, in other news I am dead, but whatever. I can’t see through my TEARS to pick a blog, this is why we don’t fucking shuffle Hamilton, fuck this, I’m going back to listening to Shinedown and Fall Out Boy. I’m just lucky it didn’t whip out fucking Hurricane or some shit.
26: (truth) What’s the last movie you watched? (dare) Reblog the most recent of your own selfies posted on tumblr, and in the tags say two things you like about your appearance in it?
Gonna do truth because I don’t really…do selfies? Like, I don’t have an issue with them, it just never occurs to me to take them. The last movie I watched was…ah, I think it was The Thirteenth Warrior. Might have been The Mummy. Don’t think it was Labyrinth. There’s a trend, I guess.
First of all, WHOA, people did the thing, that is SO NOVEL, y’all are AWESOME, way to help me procrastinate.
Okay, so, ANYWAY.
12: (truth) What are your five favorite girls’ names and five favorite boys’ names? (dare) Copy and paste the 14th line of text from the last document you worked on in Word or Google Drive.
I’m going to go dare because…uh…otherwise it would take thought. “It
hurt,” Jupiter Two protested, and
their hushed tone trembled with humor.
In lieu of all of the sensationalist shark media occurring out there this summer, let’s talk about shark behavior and, in specific, shark attacks and white shark.
Some basic white shark facts (and yes,
Carcharodon carcharias is often also officially called the great white, but that just exacerbates all the media attention, so white shark it is). Whites are huge pelagic (open water) sharks that get on average 4-5 meters long, and their only known predator as an adult are orcas. They’re one of the longest lived cartilaginous fish known with a lifespan that appears to extend into their 70′s. They have hella tons of teeth and lots of rows of them, so that when one pops out the next just pops into place as if on a conveyor belt. A white shark’s bite force is something like 4000 pounds per square inch from a six-foot-long animal. (Thanks to wiki for all the basic facts).
Have a white shark anatomical drawing from wiki, because while it’s nightmare-inducing, it’s the only thing about sharks that should be.
People love to talk about sharks as these horrible monsters of the deep, eating everything they come across with gruesome abandon. This is just ‘perfect’ for summer, when sharks start showing up on beaches in the US and scaring the bejeezus out of basically everyone.
Luckily, those people are making things up. You’re more likely to die because you shook a vending machine and it fell on top of you than you are to get bitten (note: not attacked) by a white shark. There’s a couple things you’re got to know about how sharks function to understand why worrying about getting nommed on by one at the beach is pretty silly.
To start, they’re not man-eaters. Sharks don’t even know what a human is. We’re not aquatic organisms and they’ve probably only rarely encountered humans before, so there’s no reason to assume they’re going to be like ‘omg tasty hooman’ and charge over for a snack We don’t fit into what sharks consider prey, so they’re not going to prey on us intentionally.
However, they do prey on seals. Tasty, blubbery, freaking-stupidly-clever-and-fast seals. And a human on a surfboard (which is when almost all shark encounters happen that result in injury) happens to look mightily like a seal if all you can see is a silhouette. More importantly, it’s a slow, stationary seal, which implies an easy meal. Most of the time, sharks ‘attack’ surfers thinking they’re seals. And guess what? Humans do not have all that tasty, energy-loaded blubber that seals do. We’re pretty bony and we’re on these weird plastic things that have got to taste nasty as hell. Most shark ‘attacks’ last for one bite, because the shark pretty quickly realizes that we’re not the pinniped it thought we were, and those bones aren’t worth the effort, and it leaves. Not great for the surfer who is now missing lots of bits, but hey, the shark isn’t purposefully being an asshole. It was a case of mistaken identity!
But there are lots of encounters where people don’t get hurt, right? They just get the shit scared out of them when a shark starts face-punching their arm, and panic, and call the media, and suddenly it’s an attack again. This is actually because most of a shark’s sensory organs are on it’s face.
All those red dots are organs called the ampullae of lorenzini, and they sense electrical stimulus. They’re the organs that all cartilaginous fish use to locate food - when you see a ray sweeping it’s rostrum across the sand, it’s using it’s ampullae to search for buried critters. So if a shark is curious about something, say, a human, the first response is to nose it to get more information. That’s not aggression, it’s curiosity. Then, unfortunately, if it still wants more information, it’ll go and take a nibble - because, if you look above, there are more dots right around the mouth than anywhere else. Sharks are basically the really sharp aquatic equivalent of that annoying baby who has to put everything in it’s mouth.
Because humanity is collectively terrified of anything that has more naturally provided pointy bits than we do, everything has to demonize sharks, and that ends really badly. Everything gets interpreted as aggression. This, for instance, is a video in which a shark attempts to figure out what a pontoon boat is and gets stuck in the float. The people watching it of course put JAWS music on and captioned it as an attack, but that’s just a stressed shark going ‘wtf is this weird thing and why won’t it give me my teeth back’.
It’s shark season, but that doesn’t mean they’re out to eat us. We’re a bony, problematic food that likes to play mean tricks by pretending to be seals. If you don’t want to get attacked by a shark? Be careful about being in the water, and don’t surf at sunset or sunrise. If you see a shark being inquisitive, just bop it. They’re not used to any sort of physical contact from something that isn’t either food, a predator, or a mate, so they’ll generally just leave immediately.
Tl;dr, sharks are mouthy babies who aren’t good at differentiating humans from seals, and we certainly don’t help them any.
TRUTH OR DARE: send me a number and i have to EITHER answer the question for "truth" or do what the "dare" says to do
1:
(truth) Who was your first major celebrity crush? (dare) Put your music player on shuffle and post the first five songs.
2:
(truth) What's the most embarrassing thing that's happened to you in the past week? (dare) Refresh your dashboard and send an anonymous compliment to the person who posted whatever's at the top of your dash.
3:
(truth) What are your three favorite things about your appearance? (dare) List all nine of your tumblr crushes, and describe each blog/blogger in one word.
4:
(truth) What is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you? (dare) Post the oldest selfie on your camera roll.
5:
(truth) If your parents knew everything you've ever done, what would they think is the worst thing? (dare) Tag the three nonmutuals you admire most.
6:
(truth) What is the last thing you purchased? (dare) Tag three people you've thirst followed.
7:
(truth) How many hours did you sleep last night? (dare) Send an anonymous compliment to the last person who followed you.
8:
(truth) If you could go on a date with any of your mutuals, who would it be and what would you do? (dare) Send an anonymous compliment to one of your four "Biggest Fans" on tumblr.
9:
(truth) How did you meet your best friend? (dare) Refresh your dashboard. Open the blog of the person who posted whatever's at the top of your dash. Reblog their most recent selfie.
10:
(truth) What was your favorite band five years ago? (dare) Tag a blog that posts very different content from yours, but that you couldn't imagine not following.
11:
(truth) Where did you get each article of clothing you're wearing right now? (dare) Pick up the closest book to you. Turn to page 39 and copy down line 7.
12:
(truth) What are your five favorite girls' names and five favorite boys' names? (dare) Copy and paste the 14th line of text from the last document you worked on in Word or Google Drive.
13:
(truth) What's your most irrational fear? (dare) Tag five mutuals who take amazing selfies.
14:
(truth) If you could only wear one outfit for the rest of your life (consisting of clothes you already own), what would it be? (dare) Tag someone you follow who has amazing fashion sense.
15:
(truth) If you could rock any unusual article of clothing/makeup technique/hairstyle, what would it be? (dare) Go to the blog of the last person you reblogged a text post from. Reblog your favorite of their selfies.
16:
(truth) What is your dream job? (dare) Post the four most recent pictures in your camera roll.
17:
(truth) Where is the last place you went that took over two hours to get to? (dare) Post screenshots of your phone's lock screen and home screen.
18:
(truth) How old were you when you had your first kiss? If you haven't had it yet, how old do you want to be? (dare) Go to the last app/tab you opened. Post a screenshot.
19:
(truth) What is the first thing you remember having to keep secret? (dare) Tag five bloggers who you associate with being obsessed with something particular, and list what each of them is obsessed with.
20:
(truth) What does your bedroom look like? (dare) Take one selfie and post it. You only get one shot! (No old selfies or retrying, even if you think you look bad)
21:
(truth) What three fictional characters would you most like to meet? (dare) Write your name down on a piece of paper and draw a quick picture of yourself. Take a photo of it and post it.
22:
(truth) What are three things you're looking forward to? (dare) Tag the last three people you reblogged posts from, and estimate how many followers they have.
23:
(truth) What are your three biggest turn ons, and your three biggest turn offs? (dare) Put your music player on shuffle. Without actually listening to it, write the lyrics to the chorus of the first song.
24:
(truth) If you could only own five material objects (not counting life necessities like food/water/a house/etc) what would they be? (dare) Put your music player on shuffle. Post what the first three songs are, and for each one, tag a blog that the song reminds you of.
25:
(truth) What is the last thing you lied about? (dare) Tag three people you want to know better and ask them each three questions about themselves.
26:
(truth) What's the last movie you watched? (dare) Reblog the most recent of your own selfies posted on tumblr, and in the tags say two things you like about your appearance in it?
27:
(truth) What are three things you like about yourself unrelated to your appearance? (dare) Post a picture from your camera roll that you've been meaning to post on tumblr.
28:
(truth) How do you take your coffee? (dare) Post the last picture you posted on a social media platform other than tumblr.
29:
(truth) What are your worst habits? (dare) Put your Top 25 Most Played songs on shuffle and list the first five.
30:
(truth) What is the last thing you did that you have to keep secret from someone? Who do you have to keep it secret from? (dare) Tag five blogs with great URLs.
