Writing for the Internet

If some of the punctuation on this site surprises you, it's because of Internet limitations.

My Web site used to adhere to the same laws of fastidiousness that I apply to printed documents, but when question marks started appearing in Google search results from my site, I realized I had to tone down my picky use of en dashes, curly quotation marks, and ellipses. The fact is that some computers' character sets don't parse these characters correctly.

So, for this site, and in e-mail messages, I make the following modifications:

• " - " instead of a long (em) dash. Yes, that's a plain old hyphen flanked by spaces. I know that the traditionally correct representation of an em dash is two hyphens, but some browsers and e-mail programs will split two hyphens at a line break.
• "-" instead of an en dash. Most people don't pay much attention to en dashes anyway, so there's not much to be lost by using hyphens instead.
• Three periods ("...") instead of an ellipsis. True, the periods should be separated by spaces, but I don't trust all browsers to keep the periods together on the same line, even if the spaces are nonbreaking (hard) spaces.
• Straight quotation marks instead of curly quotation marks. This site uses the Arial typeface, which on most Windows computers doesn't distinguish straight and curly quotation marks at small point sizes. Thus, many readers will see no difference, and it's a heck of a lot easier for me to hit the single-quotation-mark key once than to press Alt-0146.
• Commas and periods outside the quotation marks. In this age of passwords and funky-looking URLs, it's often important to distinguish whether a comma or period is actually part of the text in quotation marks. If I'm told to type "this," I'll type five characters. If I'm told to type "this", I'll type only four.
• Removal of accent marks in English words. I used to put them in words such as "cafe" and "resume," but since not all computers show them correctly, I can make do without them. In other languages, however, they are important: The Spanish words "lena" and "leņa" have very different meanings. You'll find lots of accents on my travelogue for the trip that included Mongolia and Hungary.

Here's some more advice for writing e-mail messages: Keep to simple text. Many e-mail readers, especially Web-based ones, can't handle bold and italic formatting, colors, and bullets, and such decorations usually needlessly add to the size of the message. Use capital letters for headings, a row of dashes for separators, and a raised dot (·) as a makeshift bullet (almost all computers can handle that character). On Windows machines, the raised dot is Alt-0183 on the number keypad (if Num Lock is on). On the Macintosh, it's Option-Shift-9.