formerly sploon-fic-fan

So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.

We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.

And then I look up.

And holy shit.

There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”

And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.

assorted minds. on magma. with friends.

Triplets At The Carousel

cyberheaven mind <3

There’s no such thing.

It doesn’t exist.

When we say that a rule or instruction is “intuitive”, we’re really talking about two things:

1. How clearly explained is it?

2. How similar is it to stuff I’m already familiar with?

You’ve gotta recognise that this is the case, because if you’re aiming to write “intuitive” rules or instructions without this recognition, all you’re really doing is assuming that the reader has exactly the same prior knowledge and experiences that you do. When you’re judging intuitiveness-in-itself, that’s the yardstick you’re using, whether you realise it or not.

You have to take a step back and explicitly ask yourself: okay, this seems intuitively obvious to me, but what prior knowledge and experience was necessary to render it so? Can I safely assume that same prior knowledge and experience on the part of my audience?

A parenthetical aside (like this one) is meant for providing a brief example, clarification, or elaboration upon a concept that’s just been introduced or discussed. If you’re introducing or discussing new concepts, it should be part of the main body of the text. Clauses set off by endashes – like so – count as parenthetical for this purpose.

When you advise the reader to “note” something, you’re pointing out a potentially non-obvious application or edge case that’s already implicit in material previously discussed, and is being made explicit for the reader’s convenience. Note that, while this is a narrower remit than that of a parenthetical aside, the same general rule applies: if you’re introducing new material, you’re not noting something, you’re just saying it.

Similarly, when you tell a reader to “remember” something, it’s a callback to previous material that’s sufficiently separated from the current discussion that a refresher may be in order. On no account should you be demanding that the reader remember something you never told them in the first place! Remember: present new material directly, not as an aside.

Sidebars are for setting off discussions that are germane to the topic at hand, but would be disruptive to the flow of the main text. The trick is that sidebars are, themselves, disruptive: the reader may be unsure whether to read the sidebar first, or to continue with the main text and come back to the sidebar later, especially if the sidebar appears in the middle of a longer section. In most cases, a sidebar is like a parenthetical aside for a whole discussion rather than a particular sentence, and can be used for examples and elaborations that are too long or complicated to stuff into parentheses. If the material is too brief for a sidebar, but too tangential for a parenthetical aside, you might consider a footnote* instead.

Got it?