style guide

how 2 write like me

thought up independently of but encouraged by the existence of xanthe's style guide as well as chridd's list of neologisms

if this interests you then so may jan Misali's punctuation analysis

i write in all lowercase by default, not making exceptions for the pronoun i nor proper names (except toki pona ones)

when capitalization does occur it's usually used for emphasis (e.g. it just Doesn't Work Like That)

i almost always write numbers as digits, except in compounds like twofold and such

general rule: punctuation represents not only grammar things but also how the text would be intonated if it were spoken

no period at the end of the sentence other than to clarify intonation (e.g. huh. as opposed to huh which feels like a question), or rarely a serious tone

non-question non-exclamation sentences are instead most commonly separated with line breaks, sometimes with commas, rarely with semicolons

this can cause ambiguity when the end of one sentence ends up on the right side of the screen, making it look like it continues into the next line (this website avoids it by making each sentence a "paragraph" with minimal padding and making actual paragraphs be <div>s)

commas and question marks are also often omitted except where that would cause ambiguity

multiple commas (2 by default, can even be 1 sometimes) are used as ellipses, which is quite popular among youngins it seems

oxford comma is yes

my brain likes to interpret quotation marks as scare quotes even when they're not, so instead i used to tend to use backticks (`), which due to markdown makes the text look like code in places like reddit and discord and this website

this doesn't really happen anymore but i'll keep it on this page because why not

when i intend to do scare quotes i often multiply them a bunch, e.g. """""dubious"""""

when discussing other languages (e.g. toki pona), i use backticks to quote that language and quotation marks for english, with angle quotes («») used for tertiary languages

when periods etc exist, i put the ending punctuation of a quoted sentence inside the quotation marks and the ending punctuation of the outer sentence outside the quotation marks; should be common sense but apparently it isn't (though i do admit doubled punctuation can look a bit weird, e.g. They said "Let's go.".)

very important, almost never omitted (unlike most other lowercase users)

the usual usage is for roleplay, a la *nuzzles u*, which usually turns into italics

when using it for corrections i do *you're instead of the you're* that many seem to do, because the latter implies that there's a footnote attached to it rather than it being the footnote

regular usage: i want a cat/dog/whatever

square brackets when part of word: i want a [boy/girl/enby]friend

spaces around slashes when more than one word: i want sugar / spice / everything nice (or i want sugar/spice/everything·nice)

i write reddit notation with a slash at the start: /u/SonjaLang posted on /r/tokipona

i usually prefer a slash at the end of a url: https://hecko.my.to/style-guide/

aside from the above i also use them for marking content warnings, e.g. [spooky] <spoiler>boo</spoiler>

used with @ for marking topics: @[long animals] weasels are pretty underrated tbh

sometimes used for: queen deltarune's secondary typing quirk

used at the start of a word to mean "about/roughly", e.g. ~every means "pretty much every"

used at the end of a word for a singsongy tone that one might associate with intimacy~

the interpunct (·) is so cool that it gets a special shortcut on my keyboard, altgr + . (and you can do it too with autohotkey™)

i use it to mark suffixes after single letters or acronyms (nft·s, ssh·ing, but ddos'd), as well as "clarify" hyphen nesting order

strikethrough marks sentences that i'd mumble under my breath in speech, sorta like /j

sadly this is misunderstood by others often enough that i have hts set as a shortcut for hence the strikethrough

a trademark sign can mark that a given word/phrase has a,, special meaning i guess? kinda like the Soon™ meme but with a broader fuzzier harder to define meaning (maybe it's just emphasis or random spice who knows)

on pc i have wincompose, on android i have gboard and emoji

most common is ↑ which i use to refer to the previous message (where others use ^)

i like sometimes replacing directions like top right with the corresponding arrows (↗)

verb all the nouns, mispluralize all the wordi, doubly pluralize all the pluralses, if it looks funny then do it

no textspeak abbreviations though, except specific ones (and acronyms like tbh, mfw, etc)

generally american english but i feel like e.g. labelled looks better than labeled

usually 24-hour time except when it feels wrong or ambiguous, in which case 12-hour time without a space before the period name (e.g. 4:20am)

for dates i do year-month-day, as in iso-8601, or rather html syntax which allows a space between time and date and also allows partial notation (though for month-day i do a single preceding hyphen instead of two, a la -04-20)

some applied more consistently than others

(this section uses the international phonetic alphabet to notate pronunciation)

my target accent is american-ish but since i tend to pronounce vowels like in polish it ends up being kinda british

i like pronouncing as /ts/ (like in polish), distinguishing between e.g. \<cis\> and \<sis\>

i jokingly pronounce with an overenunciated /χ/, and seriously with a /g/

i used to capitalize the name Ralsei and all pronouns referring to Him him, due to a running gag in the ralsei bot discord server that he's a god

not much to say other than that interpuncts come before suffixes for foreign words (microsoft·u) and that for people of unknown gender i like to use ligatures (zrobiłæś) and naturally genderless forms (zdarzyło ci się zrobić)

also very insistent about potatoes being ziemniaki not kartofle

sentences on the same line are split with an interpunct with spaces on either side

in semi-formal writing, interpuncts are also added at the start and end of the line (for æsthetic symmetry), disambiguating automatic mid-sentence line breaks from intentional ones

commas around la and after taso are not used, but the function of a semicolon after ni is fulfilled by an arrow pointing right; arrows can also point left to function as a backwards semicolon of sorts

example:

i (usually) don't use meli/mije/tonsi, oko, epiku, or puwa (i think of ko as mostly meaning "squish" and would rather have a nimisin for "powder")

i do use namako, kin, kipisi, monsuta, leko, n, majuna, linluwi, kiki, taki, and te/to (but mostly just te as a sort of headnoun, e.g. te "kipisi" li pona)

i don't use tawa as "for", as in mi pali tawa pona jan → "i work for the good of humanity"

i also don't use pali as a generic verb, but rather only "work (a job)" and "create"; for "i do something" i do mi ijo (e ijo)

i enjoy transitive preposition phrases, e.g. mi tawa ma Pasiju e sina = mi tawa e sina tawa ma Pasiju

i also enjoy modifying preverbs and prepositions with things other than ala, hyphenating them for clarity, e.g. mi sona-wawa toki pona = sona mi pi toki pona li wawa

i usually don't tokiponize names except sometimes really well-known ones, like ma Pasiju for brazil above, ma Mewika for the us (though i prefer ma Juwese), toki Inli for english, ilo Siko for discord i guess,

i like putting them in sitelen·pona-esque cartouches, e.g. ilo [GitHub], supposedly so that i can disambiguate toki pona from toki [pona] but mostly it's just quirky

kin la ("also,") becomes just kin, for symmetry with taso

i use pona only as "good" and wile only as "want" and i Will rant about this

i also think pilin might be a preverb but eh