I will only quote you if I can punctuation you as I please!

I figure since I took the time to make this blog all pretty, I should actually make a new post. I haven't been sticking anything up here A: because my life is boring, and B: because I have a separate journal on here just for me, which is where I've been doing most of my journaling. But I actually thought of something to write about just now, so here it goes: I've been noticing lately that I actually have more things weird about me than I thought. I won't say "wrong with me", because they aren't flaws; they're just more weird parts of what makes me me. But anyway:


Mainly, I've been noticing my dyslexia, though I'm not even sure if that's what it is. Sometimes I think I have 'learning dyslexia' (not an actual thing, as far as I know) of some sort, because I learn things backwards or 'wrong' (example: I write most of my letters opposite the way I was taught, such as starting my 's's at the top instead of the bottom). All I know is that until eleventh grade, I spelled "assignment" as "assingment". No one ever corrected me, and I never saw anything wrong with it, until I turned in a bunch of "assingments" to my chemistry teacher, and they all came back with the title corrected. This kind of blew my world. I'm usually absolutely crazy about using proper grammar* and spelling, and I like to appear intelligent (which often doesn't show through my crazy weirdness), so I hate feeling like an idiot.

A similar situation came up when we were playing a jeopardy/hangman game in GSA for Black History Month. The phrase the group was trying to guess was "separate but equal", and I was filling in the letters. They guessed "a", and so I filled in the two 'a's, then got into a huge argument about the third. For my entire life up to that point, I'd always thought there were two different words: separate (se-pur-ay-tuh), the verb, and seperate (se-pur-it), the noun. How no one ever corrected that one, I have no idea, but it was definitely unpleasant to finally get that correction, loudly, in front the entire group. Did I mention I hate awkward social situations?

Both of these hit me especially hard since for a while those words just looked wrong to me. As the daughter of two writers, I learned most of my spelling and grammar at a young age by what looks and sounds 'right'.

Tangent: The end of the previous sentence is a case in point: if the punctuation isn't a part of the quotation (or clause), it doesn't belong between the quotation marks!!! Screw you, American techniques, and your stupid non-logical reasoning! For any that understand this: "And just why, you may ask, do [punctuation marks] belong there? Well, it seems to be the result of historical accident. When type was handset, a period or comma outside of quotation marks at the end of a sentence tended to get knocked out of position, so the printers tucked the little devils inside the quotation marks to keep them safe and out of trouble. But apparently only American printers were more attached to convenience than logic, since British printers continued to risk the misalignment of their periods and commas." (taken from: http://grammartips.homestead.com/inside.html)

And since I know the rules, I feel free to break them! (thanks, Hemingway!)



Back to that * of the second paragraph: If you disagree with my saying that I try to use proper grammar, citing examples from previous blog posts, just know that I do try, whenever applicable, to do things the 'right' way (which for me is a mix of my native American and my preferred Brit techniques). However, since I write in this blog the way I think--tangential and often nonsensical--sometimes proper grammar just has to take one for the team. I fit my crazy sentences in the best I can, using grammar the way it logically would apply if my thoughts had a hope of translating into the English language. So basically, my grammar (and spelling, if I'm in a Brit mood) is completely contradictory, ever evolving as I find styles that make more logical sense (such as single quotation marks around words when you're using 'shock quotes', rather than a direct quotation), and anything but proper (at least, the way the dictionaries believe is 'proper'). And it's also full of parenthesis. And fragment sentences.

And about the Brit thing . . . I blame growing up reading mostly books from British authors, such as Dianna Wynne Jones. So I end up spelling lots of my words the Brit way, though some--like "author" above--I don't, because like I said before, I do most of my grammar and spelling by what 'looks right' to me.

edit: okay, whatever I have, it definitely isn't dyslexia. I guess I just think and comprehend things in a way that makes it hard for me to learn things in conventional ways. If anyone has any clues about what's weird about me this week, feel free to comment!

double edit: Though I like this new 'using single quotations to separate or emphasise things that aren't quotations from the rest of your text', I think I'm starting to confuse myself to when I should be using double quotations. Bah! This is why you shouldn't try to over-think your English teachers, kids, even if the rules don't make logical sense most of the time!