Maybe it's the English major in me. Maybe it's the fact that I was taught that punctuation exists for a purpose other than to look pretty. Maybe it's the fact that anytime I see && in the middle of a sentence, my brain automatically reads it aloud to me as "And And" and I'm like...woah. Wait. WTF? MAybe it's the fact that the two ' 's in my mind don't exist...unless it's a quotation mark.

Whatever it is. I don't understand why it is not only common practice, but 'fashionable' if you will, to look for some of the most obscure keys on the keyboard in the cration of your sites name?

This will attract me: Roses and Thorns

This will make me want to kill your teachers, and parents for allowing you to pass classes with this passing as a title for you: ' ' RoSes &&& ~Th0rnz ; ;

WTF is that? ^ ^

I mean...artistic? ok....isn't that what graphics are for? Or -gasp- a decently written/explained/thought out plot?

Now don't get me wrong, not all sites that do this with the punctuation are bad. Just like not all no-app sites are bad. But. When it interferes with the way a person reads the title of your site...it's overboard. & = AND. When I see & <- that symbol, My mind reads the word "and" typing it more than once makes me repeat it in my internal monoluge, so your site titles become something like "Fame And And Fortune" to me. Am I the only one? And if I'm not, am I the only one that it drives bloody insane?

Really, its the misuse and abuse of the & symbol, and the apothesis. and the semi-colon. C'mon. Can someone explain to me this fad? Really, I'd like to know what it is about...

You're definitely not the only one, it drives me absolutely flipping spare.

Worse, one time, someone insisted on doing it in their bio on my site. I asked them to take it out and they refused. I insisted and apparently, it was just because of my ego; nothing to do with the fact that the rules say don't add stuff to the bio. Eventually, she stood down and took it out, got accepted and then just disappeared anyway. *grumble*

I'd assume it originated in an attempt to make the title of a board stand out from all the other ones, as I remember it used to be commonplace to not do that. It must have worked pretty well because now I see it everywhere. And it makes my skin crawl.

I once saw an entire board where the names of the individual forums were followed by some weird punctuation thing. I have the picture in my mind, but I can't recreate it because I have no idea what marks were even used. It was extremely distracting, to say the least.

It seems nowadays the only thing punctuation isn't used for is, well, punctuating.

I think perhaps your inner English major should focus a little more on spelling and vocabulary, seeing as you wrote 'puntuation' in your title instead of punctuation, and used the word apothesis instead of apostrophe...

...

Sorry, I just couldn't resist! I actually do agree with you: I dislike excessive punctuation just for decorative purposes, but it doesn't really bug me that much. I just refuse to do it myself.

That's how dire the situation is, see. Excessive decorative punctuation makes the English major so mad, it becomes impossible to do anything right. Soon EM's all over the world will be unable to write due to anger over this phenomenon, and who knows where we will be if an entire generation of studying writers lost their ability? We're dealing with an epidemic here. XD

Okay. I'll stop that nonsense now.

But it does drive me mad. There are very few excess uses that don't bother me. I:

.don't mind this
[ Don't ] Mind This
` This makes me think of a little bell sound. Ding!

And I have been guilty of splitting the Tally name on PB ads to become:

Tallygarunga | Australian HP magic since 2006.

Lack of thread descrip, see. But yes, I do read the punctuation. I'm trained to read punctuation! I'm also trained to read music, so here's some odd facts.

As I said, the ` before a name makes me hear a little bell sound before it. Weird.
Using a full stop before words will put those words off-beat in my head.
u s i n g s p a c i n g brings it down to sotto voce.

I have a weird head.

Ha ha! This reminds me of Victor Borge's 'Phonetic Punctuation' routine.

Clickety link for those who don't know it.

I don't like excessive decoration, like the "' ' RoSes &&& ~Th0rnz ; ;" example, but when people use punction for decoration, I don't really mine if it's simple.

Like the following:
' and title here
.and title here
( AND TITLE HERE )

And things of a similar nature. I don't mind ampersands being used either, although I also read it as 'and', since people usually use it in the beginning of their title, it just looks like "and their site name", which sort of works since on an advertising forum they're in a list of others. When I see a double ampersand, I just say and once, but with like a stutter xD A-and. I'm weird.

I am guilty for using &&. I also use ;; at the end of stuff.

Ex: Your name;;

I am very guilty, but when ppl put in '' or ~ it drives me CRAZY those look stupid. D:

I have more of a pet peeve when it comes to incorrect punctuation or spelling. I love the comma. lol The comma is my friend. DON'T USE IT WRONG! D:<

Thank you for saying that, so I didn't come off the bad guy for once.

Er, anyway, I hate ridiculously-used punctuation, too--of course, how could I not?

It's that it's simply a misuse (dare I say perversion?), and it's jarring. I read words with one part of my brain; I look at pictures with another--it's simply a different cognitive process. When people cross that line and start using marks that have meaning for simple embellishment, it makes me think they're... well... shallow. Stupid. Worse--young and female. ;)

ehh...spelling is whatever. Ya'll got what I was meaning. Besides, my spelling may be horrible in OOC posts, because otherwise it would take me more than a few seconds to reply to something. Which...for me personally is a waste of time. Plus, I posted that at four o clock in the morning my time.

Sorry if my spelling wasn't "up to par"

And My vocabulary is perfectly fine, thanks. I'm sorry I don't use humongous words in OOC posts when it isn't necessary.

Its exactly the reason why I never use &&& in my post decorations. I mean, small things like `` that or ~~~ that or maybe even [] those but too many of them drives me nuts. I do get the And And And thing when I look at titles with those occasionally.

Why must we butcher the English language?

-twitch-

Some I can cope with, don't have an issue with at all. Anything using () or [], provided they're used around actual words, I don't mind in the slightest, and if you want to stick a ` or two before the title, that's fine:

( FORUM NAME HERE)
[FORUM] NAME HERE
`` Forum Name Here

Or any variant of the above.

Some, I can cope with, but read funny, because I read the punctuation:

.forum name here gets read as -beat- forum name here.
forum name here! gets read with enthusiasm.

And some, I read wrongly. Not only that, but they just piss me off for no apparent reason >.>:

&& forum name here is read as and and forum name here, no matter how prepared I am to overlook it. Similarly, forum name && here is read as forum name and and here.

& translates to and. Accept it.

forum.name gets read as forum -beat- name.

. is a fullstop. A fullstop more or less requires a beat before one continues reading. Accept it.

Not the ~, because that's just dumb, but people throwing in " bugs me far less than double and's =P

I'd likely comment on using ;;, however I do it too, and so probably shouldn't lest I be lynched for punctuation abuse and hypocrisy >.>

Whoa, no disrespect intended... I was trying to be funny. I'll take my odd sense of humor elsewhere.

Sorry...I get a little defensive over my crappy spelling.

Probably because I am an English major...and feel like I should know better... :angry:

I think you may be role-playing at the wrong forums/websites. Whatever genre of RP you like seems to attract these types of people who use asterisks and whatnot because they enjoy "decorating" their words. I honestly look at such garbage without registering what it means such as, ' RoSes &&& ~Th0rnz ; ; means Roses and Thorns. Perhaps I'm just behind the times and I'm showing my age. I still don't like using IM jargon.

I know several English majors and none of them can spell to save their lives. It's really, really strange.

I don't roleplay at them. But I do tend to look around the directory a lot. And the sheer number of sites that do this are...amazingly disturbing.

Well, I don't much understand it either (and I'm pretty young on the scale, still).

'RoSes &&& ~Th0rnz ; ;'

I think of the letter 'z' when I read that. Because there's a 'z' at the end with they could have just used as 's'. But that's the least of the problems here, come to think of it.

I've done the following before with titles:

title here ;;
{ title here }
' title here

And I tried to do something like the Roses and Thorns one before, but it fried my brain.

Yeah, I don't get it either. I mean, it just clutters it all up, really... and my brain... implodes upon sight of it. So, yes, my brain has imploded and then repaired itself quickly many times.

Bleh, it's annoying, but it's shallower to judge a site because of it instead of its RPing.

Frankly, so long as they don't misuse it ICly I don't really care. So they have a different taste which makes them enjoy incorrect punctuation, big deal. It's OOC and people do stuff like that all the time. I has typing like dis for a whiles, some peoples likes it, other peoples don'ts.

I'm cool with simple decoration. But the key is, SIMPLE is nice, CRAZY is not. Bringing a little design and flair makes things stand out.

( ROSES and THORNS )
``roses and thorns
roses && thorns
roses and [ THORNS ]
ROSES AND THORNS!

Are all okay in my book. They draw the eye and, yes, I read them differently, which gives them a flavor different from all the others, even though they're the same words. They're simple, but unique. However, LESS is MORE. This...

' ' RoSes &&& ~Th0rnz ; ;

...is NOT lovely, it's over-the-top and all over the place. I don't know what I'm looking at, or what impact it's trying to make me see. All I see is "ew, what the hell?", which... probably isn't what they were going for in the least.

The most decorative punctuation I've ever used is [ ] or { }. I occasionally use | to split name and PB or something in an avatar claim. I despise excessive quotation marks and the & symbol...because I am just like every other intelligent human, and read & as 'and.'

But what really gets me is the underscore.

`__this i cannot stand

I'm not even sure what an underscore's actual purpose is, but I know that using it as decoration drives me bonkers.

...ellipses are also abused"

GAFF used to have a punctuation adoption program that was pretty fun. Maybe we should bring that to RPG-D? Haha!

i happen to like the ~ to. I think its pretty. lol

I agree with whoever said that so long as the IC writing is normal and decent i dont mind it either. Ppl think its creative i say leave them be... i mean sometimes yeah it can get Uberly over abused and there should be a limit to how many symbols you can use in a sentence or whatever.

The only time i really use &, ~,{}, *, etc. is when writing plotpages and at max twice but only to separate it from text and what not.

And

I don't think ppl write like that in school. I mean sometime with like Txt addicts it slips but not to that extent maybe they'll write 'like' as 'lyk' or put 'lol' in a sentence. There really isn't a need for a fancy design when you're writing with a pen/cil anyway. I think its the computers fault. lol. (just came up with that idea as i thought it out)

Marry me.

No marry me instead!

Seriously I hate and despise it when people decide to be "decorative". First and foremost it makes me think these people have no sense of aesthetics. It does not look pretty, it makes it annoying to read. Punctuation like that makes the person doing it seem like a 12-year-old. It immediately makes me think of the net speak culture and man, it just makes my skin crawl. Why o why do people insist on using those 'decorations'???

I accept very few "decorations" but it is safe to say I hate most of them. Why not just write the title normally? Why not settle for "Roses and Thorns" or "Roses & Thorns"??? When you type &&& you are saying and and and...do you have to stutter in your titles? It's amusing. There is actually a form of stuttering in typing. You just can't help it but for some mysterious reason your brain makes you hit the "&" button too many times and you think it's pretty...

You shouldn't sweat it. It was a typo and typos happen. If it's still readable I wouldn't worry about it. Unless you want to have something perfect, or unless it's an official paper, you feel it's important or you are writing IC etc.