Monday, July 25, 2011

changing conventions?

As I mentioned earlier, our English language keeps evolving, as does writing prose...
It can be hard to keep track of all the rules and their changes.
When you have a character ask a question in dialogue do you use the tag "he asked" or "he said"? I have a writer friend who insists on always using "asked". Is this the convention? I'm sensing this is a pet peeve of hers.

What's the current convention on italicizing thoughts? For a while there we were supposed to italicize thoughts but now it seems, not. What do you think?

I have a teacher who insists on "damned" as the adjective (rather than "damn"), which is technically correct, but the incorrect version is in common use.

One of my pet peeves is when people use "ok" or "OK" instead of "okay" or "O.K." Ugh! Again, this is super-common. Is it time for me to give up on this one?

How about you? Any pet-peeves? Any good resources for dealing with all these things?

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