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  1. Bear Ribs

    Writing Tips Thread

    Thinking loosely on nested hyphenated phrases, my first inclination would be to restructure the sentence so that said phrases are separated rather than nested.
  2. Bear Ribs

    Writing Tips Thread

    No, not really, just ribbing the name a bit and punning off the authors of the famous manual Strunk & White. Did you pick your username based on their style manual? You are correct, that is proper usage. Chastisement accepted. I've honestly never actually looked carefully at that situation...
  3. Bear Ribs

    Writing Tips Thread

    Only in some specific style sheets (Granted AP style sheet does this and it's one of the more popular for formal writing) Sometimes the rule is that X year old is not hyphenated, because spelled out numbers such as fifty-six are usually hyphenated and adding additional hyphens makes it...
  4. Bear Ribs

    Writing Tips Thread

    Oddly no. Hyphens are their own complicated ruleset but often you hyphenate X-year-old and similar if it is being used before a noun as a modifier, such as eighteen-year-old soldier, but otherwise it is left unhyphenated (the soldier is eighteen years old.) More sadly, the exact way to use...
  5. Bear Ribs

    Writing Tips Thread

    That's... not actually the rule. It's quite a bit more complicated. Outside a starting sentence, digits are always used if there is a decimal point and customarily used anytime there are more than three digits while spelled out numbers are used for less than three digits. Over three digits...
  6. Bear Ribs

    Writing Tips Thread

    Tropes are useful tools but only if you know why the trope exists. Once you know the reason for a rule or trope you can break and reuse it at will because you can compensate for why the rule is there in the first place. A good example is Watership Down, which on the face of it should not work...
  7. Bear Ribs

    Writing Tips Thread

    Very much. I see people post Youtube videos all the time and then I click and there's ten minutes of introductions and chatting and they still haven't gotten to anything useful and I close it. Clownfish TV has reached the point where I auto-close anything I accidentally open of theirs because...
  8. Bear Ribs

    Writing Tips Thread

    I had to laugh when I'd hit 4:00 and she mentioned how her advice would help you trim the fat, when I'd gone in 4 minutes already without anything on actual writing, just her yammering about how amazing her advice is. It is good advice once she gets there but it tends to drive me crazy how much...
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