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What is there to say? I'm not very interesting. I'm not a good writer. I don't even dress well. If you insist on knowing something about me just wander through the archives. It's all there.

Sunday, May 28, 2006

On color coding text

The weather here went from cool and comfortable to hot and miserable seemingly overnight. As soon as I wrote this sentence I realized that it sounded better to write it differently. (Seemingly overnight, the weather here went from cool and comfortable to hot and miserable.) I am not certain which of the two versions is more grammatically correct, but I like the way the latter version sounds when I say it aloud.

This may be one of those gray areas of language where the way that we speak differs from the way that we write. It seems as though there ought to be a convention that allows us to communicate to a reader that we are writing in the way that we speak, rather than writing as we would write writing. I suppose that that is what quotation marks are supposed to do. Using quotation marks, however, makes it seem more like a narrative or dialogue to be actually spoken rather than material that should be read as we meant it be read, not heard. Quotations marks don’t suggest that we meant to write it, not speak it, except that we wrote it so that it sounded right when we spoke it.

No, there needs to be a different sort of clue. Perhaps, since inexpensive color printers are so commonplace, we could use a color code. Classic black text would be written in the way that reads the way it should be written. Blue text would be written in the way that sounds right to us when we speak it aloud, although we intended for it to be read, no spoken.

Text that, as written, is probably indicative of some sort of progressive brain disorder?

Red.

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