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A Short And Sweet Style Guide For VN Editing


Fred the Barber

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While the principal job of a good VN editor is line editing (making sure that a line reads well and that a script flows), copy editing is vital as well, and copy editing should follow a style which is consistent both internally and with other comparable texts. That said, most VN editors (myself included) are way too lazy to sit and read the MLA, Chicago, or AP style guide cover to cover and actually internalize it, let alone to extrapolate from them what, if any, changes need to be considered for styling a VN, which, being a different medium, may require different stylistic choices than the media covered by traditional style guides.

As is abundantly obvious if you read older officially-localized VNs, VN style has grown somewhat organically over the past decade and, if you compare against works published in only the last year, you'll find that the predominant style has become fairly consistent across the major localization companies. However, fan translations often miss the mark and make many styling mistakes and deviations from this standard, resulting in irritatingly inconsistent texts.

To help solve that, I put together this brief VN style guide a couple months ago and shared it around a number of people, and I've subsequently refined it a bit in preparation for posting it publicly today.

This is not a full prose style guide by any means, but it covers every interesting and potentially divisive topic I've seen come up in styling VNs; it is, I believe, pretty complete, especially given how concise it is. I've tried to avoid topics of grammar and of style that are not generally deviated from in VNs. Basically, I only tried to tackle areas where people actually have issues. This style guide, I believe, more or less represents the state of the art in officially localized VNs. I haven't read a recent official localization which I noticed to be following different rules than the ones I lay out here.

All that said, take this with a grain of salt: I'm not a professional, and I haven't actually read any official MLA/Chicago/AP style guide cover to cover, though I have dabbled in each of them. At the end of the day, this is more a summary of what I've empirically discovered than anything else. But when you're a fan translation editor, you've got to start somewhere; this is a better option than any other that I know of.

https://github.com/FredTheBarber/EditingPublic/blob/master/style guide.md

Feedback is most welcome, whether to offer corrections or to ask questions for areas which I have not covered.

Edit: By popular demand, I've made a markdown version of the document so it doesn't display like shit on github. The link has been updated accordingly.

Edit2: who will edit for the editors?

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Except British rules rule.

 

Other than that, I find that I generally agree with what's here.

Although...
What's the issue with the *cough* effects like *cough* these ones? Visual Novels aren't exactly literary works, and they are generally easier for me to identify than the Translator's poor attempt at conveying whatever ridiculous sound effect the character mimics. I mean, how the flipping barnacle am I to write down the sound one makes when one mimics the sound of a fire? Or something that actually does not make any sound?
As long as it's consistent, I don't see why not to use them.

Edit: Though on second thought situations like my examples are already beyond help. It is probable that no amount of asterisks would save them.

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Regarding asterisked sound effects, I kind of used to think the same thing: what am I supposed to do with this weird sound anyway? So I used them. Then I looked back and the script was just littered with them. They were everywhere, and they really interrupted the flow of reading. So, I went through in one day and gutted them out of the script, and it was like a breath of fresh air. Since then, I came around to the conclusion in the guide, that it's best to just universally avoid the asterisk thing, and judging from the recent official localizations I've read, I'm not alone on that opinion. I only see them in fan TLs nowadays, and they're always jarring, especially in speech lines. Once you force yourself to avoid them, you find both that it's not really all that hard and that it massively pays off in terms of readability.

Edited by Fred the Barber
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1 minute ago, Darklord Rooke said:

I was about to say we should find some way to get this pinned, but then I saw this:

As an American, I strongly recommend you use American English.

And my opinion changed :P 

Not all opinions presented in the style guide are universally held. They are, however, all indisputably correct.

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British rule also rules.

 

You are one who finds the individual line especially important and is easily jarred. I can't say I see what you mean when you claim that the inclusion of such effects is jarring or that they interrupt the 'flow'.
And so I wonder, what is flow?
To me, flow is weather or not I can uninterruptedly read through many lines without anything that makes me pause to attempt to comprehend something that should be easily comprehensible. Compare deep, philosophical lines or lines with many meanings to them, where pausing is intended, with lines where the 'that' pronoun is used so many times I have no idea who's referring to what and what that 'what' it is.
Hyperbole aside, the small -- mere milliseconds even -- pauses that arise from certain somewhat ambiguous or oddly structured sentences are what I consider "interrupting the flow", and I must admit: To me, those asterisked sound effects do none of that to my person. I'd bet the odd beginning of the previous sentence/'paragraph' might've made you pause (or just about most lines written by me). That's breaking the flow, the way I see it. Not spotting a few asterisked sound effects.

So I can't say I'm convinced. I think asterisked sound effects can be used for good, especially in more comedic situations; Like a *drowns* amongst a line or a line full of *sob sob*s. Things like Stare and Sob without asterisks make sense when it's something the character is actually pronouncing. When it's a sound they make, not pronounce, I think writing it down without asterisks is a poor solution. And I still don't know what to put when writing a cough down.

So the solution is removing them entirely? Not always ideal, especially when there's no accompanying narration to indicate that a sound was made and/or heard. Assuming you're like me and you can't write a cough down, do you just remove them all?
Oh crap, I accidentally wrote the character's illness out of the translation. Too bad.

Outside of dialogue it's a free for all. Feel free to rewrite the entire thing if it makes you happier.

 

On the topic of colons (which is not the topic we were on, but the one I just forced us to be on), I must ask: Is the way I've used them in this post correct? (here's me sneakily trying to get you to do the work for me lolevil)

 

(As an aside, would "Put the seatbelt on yourself" give you pause? I actually stopped to think whether a line like this meant that one should should put the seatbelt by themselves, or that they should put it on their person -- a small redundancy, the sort of thing that pops up in daily speech.)

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In my experience, there's an exception for the hyphenization-of-honorifics rule when the original Japanese would add a glottal stop. When this happens, it's usually represented using consonant doubling. For a non-translated but salient example, the weeb visual novel Katawa Shoujo uses both "Shicchan"* and "Hicchan" for Shizune and Hisao respectively. For something the old guard will get, look at poor Sacchin in Tsukihime. The same applies to stuff like "Takkun".

*a Hepburn hardliner may argue that this should be "Shitchan", but fuck them, I only write "matcha" for green tea because normies use that spelling).

-

You might want to either linebreak the document manually or use something else than github or, idk, change some setting; lines are currently not automatically word wrapped and reading the text online is thus a pain. I had to copy it to notepad++ to read it personally.

-

The "other sometimes untranslated terms" heading is confusing when it comes to terminology. On first reading, it seemed to me that you were placing "senpai, sensei, onee-san" in the "not honorifics" bucket, especially since you end with "bento" which actually isn't one. On second reading I realized that you may not have meant this, but it's a mental stretch. I think this section needs to be rewritten.

I think the correct heuristic, if you keep any Japanese words, is probability of comprehension. The most common honorifics that people may know about is -san, -kun, -chan, and -sama. -tan, maybe. Knowing about "nii-san" and "nee-san" comes next and is somewhat more dubious, and those terms arguably carry more important information that you may be denying uncomprehending viewers if they are not clued in by other details. "senpai" and "sensei" are slightly further out, but not much. All in all I agree with the position of removing honorifics, however.

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The fact that the resulting name order will be different from the voice over name order will not be confusing to people. Anybody who can listen to the VO carefully enough to realize that will also be able to understand what's being done.

This ideological statement needs statistical backing. From what I understand the people you consulted with have been editors, not readers, and honestly preferring to reverse name order is status signalling by people who consider themselves more "learned". For what it's worth, back when I was a nascent VN reader I was bothered by the reversed name order used for the localization of Ever17.

Since  what you're really trying to do is establish standards, removing the ideological statement and letting the rest remain is also fine.

-

I disagree with your interpretation of "Uuu" -> "Aww"; the mapping is simply too imprecise and will cause conflicts when lazy people decide to apply the letter of your guideline. For example, part of one line in the wondrously transliterated Koirizo fan translation is rendered as "Uuu, gusu" in its English translation. Gusu is a sob, Uuu is a sound of consternation and unhappiness in this case. Writing this as "Aww, sniff" would not accurately portray the tone the VA used here. I might be mistaken about how Americans interpret "Aww", however - I see it as 1. dejection 2. disappointment and 3. you just saw a kitten do something cute.

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Completely avoid using English sound effects inside asterisks. They are even less acceptable inside dialogue than they are inside narration, and dialogue is where you'll always be tempted to use them. Just don't do it, and you'll end up happier with the result.

Despite what I said about ideology above, I would like some kind of justification for this, hedged unless you have good reasons not to. Reading the comment thread you have done so in the thread, and considering that you made personal remarks further on in the document, you may want to add it for this.

-

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As an American, I strongly recommend you use American English.

You could make some fairly strong demographic arguments as to why this is a good idea if you wanted to. I guess you might have left it out for a reason, though.

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I approve! All these preferences are in accordance with my―

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Rule: when using "?!" at the end of a sentence to signify a surprised question, always use them in that order, not the opposite order.

I LIKE THEM IN THE OTHER ORDER.

BedC2f.gif

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After an ellipsis, the next sentence SHOULD be capitalized IF AND ONLY IF the subsequent phrase is a separate sentence from the original and is an independent clause (i.e., it can stand alone as a sentence).

Examples:

  • "I think you're... cute."
  • "You make me so mad... I'm going to kill you!"

I suggest you use another example instead of the second one, considering that "I'm" is capitalized regardless of whether it begins a sentence.

Quote

Morever, in ADV-style games,

Typo.

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Style guides consistently recommend that punctuation goes inside quotation marks,

In American English, commas and periods always go inside quotation marks (even when there's a quotation within a quotation). Meanwhile, everything else (exclamation points, question marks, semicolons, colons) can go outside of the quotation marks as needed. In contrast to what you say ("I diverge from typical style guides and recommend you move the punctuation outside the inner quotation"), your examples are in conformity with American style guides.

Quote

and also that when quoting, the quotation should be introduced with a comma.

You may know this and not have said it, but the above applies only when the quotation is an independent clause. For example, each of the following is correct:

  • He said to me, "Give back the cat."
  • He told me to "give back the cat."

Each of the following is incorrect:

  • He said to me "Give back the cat."
  • He told me to, "give back the cat."

I can offer segments of The Chicago Manual of Style for the things above, because it appears that they don't want to make it freely available online.

Lastly, TELL EVERYONE TO USE THE OXFORD COMMA, YOU HEATHEN.

Edited by Fiddle
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Thanks, @Fiddle, for all the feedback. Addressed it all and updated the document. Still need to look through Zaka's feedback... Line-by-line comments on Fiddle's comments.

7 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

I suggest you use another example instead of the second one, considering that "I'm" is capitalized regardless of whether it begins a sentence.

Insanely enough, I actually noticed my previous example had exactly the same problem today before I posted this, and so I rewrote it... but apparently I rewrote it to another sentence with exactly the same problem. FML. Fixed.

9 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

Typo.

I edited this myself today and fixed up all the little problems I saw, but of course I couldn't stop myself from rewriting some sections entirely, so naturally I introduced more typos. Like, say, this one. FML. Fixed.

10 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

In American English, commas and periods always go inside quotation marks (even when there's a quotation within a quotation). Meanwhile, everything else (exclamation points, question marks, semicolons, colons) can go outside of the quotation marks as needed. In contrast to what you say ("I diverge from typical style guides and recommend you move the punctuation outside the inner quotation"), your examples are in conformity with American style guides.

You may know this and not have said it, but the above applies only when the quotation is an independent clause. For example, each of the following is correct:

  • He said to me, "Give back the cat."
  • He told me to "give back the cat."

Each of the following is incorrect:

  • He said to me "Give back the cat."
  • He told me to, "give back the cat."

I can offer segments of the Chicago Manual of Style for the things above, because it appears that they don't want to make it freely available online.

Your guidance is very much appreciated, thank you! I've fixed up this section with all these recommendations.

10 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

Lastly, TELL EVERYONE TO USE THE OXFORD COMMA, YOU HEATHEN.

I figured it went without saying, but sure, I've added a whole section devoted to the superiority of the serial comma, just for you. Plus there was a funny news story about it recently, so adding this section gives me a chance to share that.

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@Zakamutt thanks, this is great! Addressed your comments and uploaded a new version of the guide. Here's some line-by-line responses as well:

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

In my experience, there's an exception for the hyphenization-of-honorifics rule when the original Japanese would add a glottal stop. When this happens, it's usually represented using consonant doubling. For a non-translated but salient example, the weeb visual novel Katawa Shoujo uses both "Shicchan"* and "Hicchan" for Shizune and Hisao respectively. For something the old guard will get, look at poor Sacchin in Tsukihime. The same applies to stuff like "Takkun".

*a Hepburn hardliner may argue that this should be "Shitchan", but fuck them, I only write "Matcha" for green tea because normies use that spelling).

Good point, I completely missed this pattern. That said, I haven't actually formed a strong opinion about what's the right thing to do with these, assuming I'm following the rest of the guidelines in the style guide; my inclination is to go the same direction you say. It does feel like it goes against the grain of the "drop honorifics" theme, but this casual form with the glottal stop feels more like a nickname than like proper (and thus somewhat less meaningful) usage of an honorific.

Majo Koi actually has exactly one route where, as a running joke, everybody starts calling Takumi "Takkun" (my suspicion: possibly a different writer from the rest of the VN, and the head writer just shrugged it off and rolled with it). Now, honorifics are actually still in the current Majo Koi script, but I'm likely to drop them soon (like... probably today or tomorrow I'll go through the whole script and rewrite them away). When I do that sweep, I expect Takumi will retain that same ridiculous-sounding pseudo-nickname, Takkun.

I've updated the guide to mention this form and that suggestion, but I'm intentionally leaving out the term "glottal stop" from it, since I don't think most people have studied enough phonology to look at that phrase and react with anything but "Wot?"

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

You might want to either linebreak the document manually or use something else than github or, idk, change some setting; lines are currently not automatically word wrapped and reading the text online is thus a pain. I had to copy it to notepad++ to read it personally.

It's now available in markdown format and the blog link has been updated (and I actually deleted the .txt file). Should be much more readable now; apologies for my laziness in not doing so sooner. I actually had had people complain to me about the formatting before, but it wasn't on github so it wasn't quite as bad back then, so I just ignored them... But yeah, the display on github was pretty bad.

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

The "other sometimes untranslated terms" heading is confusing when it comes to terminology. On first reading, it seemed to me that you were placing "senpai, sensei, onee-san" in the "not honorifics" bucket, especially since you end with "bento" which actually isn't one. On second reading I realized that you may not have meant this, but it's a mental stretch. I think this section needs to be rewritten.

I think the correct heuristic, if you keep any Japanese words, is probability of comprehension. The most common honorifics that people may know about is -san, -kun, -chan, and -sama. -tan, maybe. Knowing about "nii-san" and "nee-san" comes next and is somewhat more dubious, and those terms arguably carry more important information that you may be denying uncomprehending viewers if they are not clued in by other details. "senpai" and "sensei" are slightly further out, but not much. All in all I agree with the position of removing honorifics, however.

I did indeed intend to say senpai, sensei, onee-san, etc., are not honorifics (though obviously the "-san" there is). I think I was going into this with the mindset that "English doesn't have honorifics," but of course I was just plain wrong there; it does. They're just less ubiquitous than the Japanese ones. I've brushed up this section a fair bit, and generally went along the same lines of what you have here.

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

This ideological statement needs statistical backing. From what I understand the people you consulted with have been editors, not readers, and honestly preferring to reverse name order is status signalling by people who consider themselves more "learned". For what it's worth, back when I was a nascent VN reader I was bothered by the reversed name order used for the localization of Ever17.

Since  what you're really trying to do is establish standards, removing the ideological statement and letting the rest remain is also fine.

I modified this section a bit to explain the backing reasoning for this opinion: in a nutshell, GivenName FamilyName is the natural order in English, so I honestly expect people to just find the alternative confusing. What it comes down to is, at this point, even if I was given a blanket guarantee that every single Japanese translation I saw from here on out was going to have names in FamilyName GivenName order, I'd still have to think hard about it due to the accumulated weight of experience reading stuff in English.

That said, like I mentioned in the section, this is one where I have a less strong opinion; I mostly called it out just to make sure it was mentioned and that I could drive home the importance of consistency in it, more so than to lay out a single answer.

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

I disagree with your interpretation of "Uuu" -> "Aww"; the mapping is simply too imprecise and will cause conflicts when lazy people decide to apply the letter of your guideline. For example, part of one line in the wondrously transliterated Koirizo fan translation is rendered as "Uuu, gusu" in its English translation. Gusu is a sob, Uuu is a sound of consternation and unhappiness in this case. Writing this as "Aww, sniff" would not accurately portray the tone the VA used here. I might be mistaken about how Americans interpret "Aww", however - I see it as 1. dejection 2. disappointment and 3. you just saw a kitten do something cute.

Good point! I should call out that my list here is not intended to be prescriptive. "Uuu" is often more of a slightly disgusted "Ugh," for instance, and probably some other things as well. I've updated the section to drive home that these are examples and not a blanket gospel answer, and also to mention the "ugh" translation of "Uuu."

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

Despite what I said about ideology above, I would like some kind of justification for this, hedged unless you have good reasons not to. Reading the comment thread you have done so in the thread, and considering that you made personal remarks further on in the document, you may want to add it for this.

Done

1 hour ago, Zakamutt said:

You could make some fairly strong demographic arguments as to why this is a good idea if you wanted to. I guess you might have left it out for a reason, though.

I always feel a bit like I'm making an argumentum ad baculum when I say "you should use American English because there are more of us," and I don't think there's really any better rationale than that one. So, while I do religiously hold to this style myself and get annoyed when anybody else doesn't (looking at you, Chrono Clock), I don't think I really have a leg to stand on, so I prefer to leave it as a somewhat petulant statement of personal preference. It's my way of saying, "You can do something else if you really want, but personally, it'll make me sad."

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1 hour ago, Fred the Barber said:

I figured it went without saying, but sure, I've added a whole section devoted to the superiority of the serial comma, just for you. Plus there was a funny news story about it recently, so adding this section gives me a chance to share that.

Boo! Tell everyone to omit it instead. The ensuing obfuscation it will sometimes cause will provide much amusement 

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34 minutes ago, Darklord Rooke said:

Boo! Tell everyone to omit it instead. The ensuing obfuscation it will sometimes cause will provide much amusement 

"I discussed the matter with Rooke, my friend and a grammatical expert."

Ha! Look at how ridiculous that sentence is without the Oxford comma!

Edited by Fiddle
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12 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

"I discussed the matter with Rooke, my friend and a grammatical expert."

Ha! Look at how ridiculous that sentence is without the Oxford comma!

It would actually be better with a colon

"I discussed the matter with Rooke: my friend and a grammatical expert."

There, perfect. No need for any comma :3

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44 minutes ago, Fiddle said:

"I discussed the matter with Rooke, my friend and a grammatical expert."

Ha! Look at how ridiculous that sentence is without the Oxford comma!

Mmm... I thought think your sentence is always ridiculous, comma or no comma.

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7 hours ago, Fiddle said:

I approve! All these preferences are in accordance with my―

Funny, I distinctly remember a lengthy debate where you favored putting spaces after leading ellipses, which you never actually yielded your position on, you just got tired of arguing with me. :P

That's right, I'm calling you out on that. 

Edited by Decay
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8 hours ago, Decay said:

Funny, I distinctly remember a lengthy debate where you favored putting spaces after leading ellipses, which you never actually yielded your position on, you just got tired of arguing with me. :P

That's right, I'm calling you out on that. 

I ain't gonna cure crazy. :sleep:

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I haven't forgotten you either, @Mr Poltroon, I've just been ignoring you since you asked about stuff that was harder to answer.

On 3/18/2017 at 2:35 PM, Mr Poltroon said:

You are one who finds the individual line especially important and is easily jarred. I can't say I see what you mean when you claim that the inclusion of such effects is jarring or that they interrupt the 'flow'.

And so I wonder, what is flow?
To me, flow is weather or not I can uninterruptedly read through many lines without anything that makes me pause to attempt to comprehend something that should be easily comprehensible. Compare deep, philosophical lines or lines with many meanings to them, where pausing is intended, with lines where the 'that' pronoun is used so many times I have no idea who's referring to what and what that 'what' it is.
Hyperbole aside, the small -- mere milliseconds even -- pauses that arise from certain somewhat ambiguous or oddly structured sentences are what I consider "interrupting the flow", and I must admit: To me, those asterisked sound effects do none of that to my person. I'd bet the odd beginning of the previous sentence/'paragraph' might've made you pause (or just about most lines written by me). That's breaking the flow, the way I see it. Not spotting a few asterisked sound effects.

So I can't say I'm convinced. I think asterisked sound effects can be used for good, especially in more comedic situations; Like a *drowns* amongst a line or a line full of *sob sob*s. Things like Stare and Sob without asterisks make sense when it's something the character is actually pronouncing. When it's a sound they make, not pronounce, I think writing it down without asterisks is a poor solution. And I still don't know what to put when writing a cough down.

So the solution is removing them entirely? Not always ideal, especially when there's no accompanying narration to indicate that a sound was made and/or heard. Assuming you're like me and you can't write a cough down, do you just remove them all?
Oh crap, I accidentally wrote the character's illness out of the translation. Too bad.

Outside of dialogue it's a free for all. Feel free to rewrite the entire thing if it makes you happier.

For starters, I totally agree with you that asterisked sound effects are less of an interruption than singularly complex sentence structure. Forcing the reader to go back and re-read a sentence just to try to understand what the blazes is going on when all they want is to move on to the next element in the plot is anathema to the goal of most VNs, which is, generally, to offer the straightforward entertainment of a quick jaunt through a story world, rather than the joy of ruminating on a particularly fibrous utterance.

However, *clears his throat*, I would like to point you at the hill you're about to go sliding down. It is, if I do say so myself, a slippery slope *wink*. My own personal experience with trying to use this technique was that use instantly turned to abuse *sigh*. Before too long, the dialogue was filled with all sorts of things that had no business being there; they weren't sounds being made by a speaker at all, but rather related actions which, if they needed to be communicated, belonged more properly in a narration line, and if none was available, why then the dialogue itself would have to carry the meaning *shakes his head*. It simply doesn't make sense for characters to be communicating quite so much in what is, ultimately, a poor excuse for narration *nod*.

In a nutshell, I found that the technique simply did my script more harm than it did my script good. The same is true of the use of italics in scripts I've read: I have seen them used only once that I can recall, in an official translation, and while once or twice they were helpful, much more often they were completely unneeded and simply served to call attention to themselves and look out of place. When a tool causes you more harm than it does you good, it's better to simply force yourself to throw it out and work under tighter constraints. Art has always and will always flourish under constraints, and I personally have not found it particularly onerous to go without this one tool; on the contrary, I've relished the change.

On 3/18/2017 at 2:35 PM, Mr Poltroon said:

On the topic of colons (which is not the topic we were on, but the one I just forced us to be on), I must ask: Is the way I've used them in this post correct? (here's me sneakily trying to get you to do the work for me lolevil)

Aside from their usage to introduce lists of things, you can also use a colon in place of a semi-colon when the half of a sentence after the colon is more like an illumination/rephrasing of some part of the first half, rather than a separate, related, independent clause. It's kind of an advanced technique, I guess? I don't mention it in the guide both because I don't have a solid handle on the rule myself and because I think it's not really a necessary thing to do (there are plenty of other options available), but I certainly do use colons this way myself from time to time without much thought. Your usage looks perfectly cromulent to me.

On 3/18/2017 at 2:35 PM, Mr Poltroon said:

(As an aside, would "Put the seatbelt on yourself" give you pause? I actually stopped to think whether a line like this meant that one should should put the seatbelt by themselves, or that they should put it on their person -- a small redundancy, the sort of thing that pops up in daily speech.)

(I would probably always assume the former interpretation, not the latter, without some strong contextual evidence otherwise, and I would probably only find it not to be a somewhat odd utterance when coming on the heels of a request for help putting on a seatbelt.)

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28 minutes ago, Fred the Barber said:

(I would probably always assume the former interpretation, not the latter, without some strong contextual evidence otherwise, and I would probably only find it not to be a somewhat odd utterance when coming on the heels of a request for help putting on a seatbelt.)

Totally agree with CoolFred, I would go with the former, but I would ALWAYS change the "the" to a "your" - "put your seatbelt on yourself" here the redundancy is clearer which helps to promote meaning.

But if the sentence promotes obfuscation it could always be reworded. The 2nd intepretation should be reworded to "put your seatbelt on". That should be a lot clearer. The 1st intrepretation, on the assumption it follows a plea for help, could be made clearer with something like - "No. You're a grown man, you can put on your own damn seatbelt." 

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