OOC: Grammar 101.

[xmm_jareth]

It's occurred to me that with so many new people arriving the last few weeks, there may be some pointers needed that we missed. A number of people, I think, are new to online roleplaying, or at least (obviously) new to the way it's generally done here at XMM. As has been mentioned in a couple places, this being a text-based environment, the most

Comments

[subsidaryforge]

Would of, could of, should of. Unless you want to drive English teachers to early retirement and frequent heavy drinking, no. You should have never even considered these.

Actually, here I disagree. In informal writing, especially speech, where "voice" is important (such as in RP), I think could of has a different voice than could've.

"He could've done that better," is different from, "He could of done that better." And, even less grammatical, but delightful, "He coulda done that better." They all ready exactly the same meaning wise (it's impossible to confuse the could of transliteration for anything but could've), but there's a different in tone and personality. Certainly don't use it in a formal setting, but in RP? I don't think it makes poses any harder to read.

[xmm_nisa]

Actually, wouldn't that be "He could have done better than that?" as opposed to 'could of'? Sort've, however, I don't think is a proper conjuction at all, and I definetely must agree on that.

[subsidaryforge]

I actually like the look of sort've in some settings and characters. Aheh.

I'm not quite sure what you mean (for it's been a long day) -- "of" in could of stands for 've, which stands for "have." It's a nonstandard way of writing the conjunction, essentially, which I think is just fine for characters that don't use perfect English. Some people think in could ofs.

I think my overall point is that RP is extremely informal writing and while some mistakes make communication hard (your, you're, misplaced commas, constant misspellings, etc), some are pretty negligible and can even help characterize a character.

[teza]

Word!

[holyspigot]

Note also that ellipses do have four dots if they indicate the end of a sentence. Three ellipses plus a period. Thus, four....

[xmm_jareth]

Well, yes, there's that exception. I just left it out for the sake of Monty Python.