I enjoy writing, it’s why I have this blog. But my style is far from perfect in the technical sense. I’m very aware of the many interesting and possibly unique writing quirks and habits I have. So, here I reflect on and catalog those distinct writing mannerisms.

  • I think my most prevalent (bad) habit is run-on sentences, they are everywhere! I consider my style of writing to be very conversational in its cadence, and in this way it tends to mirror my speech in many respects, and I’ve been known to be a bit of a looooong-talker.

  • Alright, I’ve mentioned that my writing is very conversational. In this vein, I use a lot of linguistic affects like “ok”, “right”, “alright”, “so”, etc… I tend to use these at the beginning of sentences.

  • I like to use hyphens (“ - “) to bridge two sentences together - joining separate, but related ideas or thoughts together in a way that a standard period doesn’t seem suited for and where a comma just wouldn’t supply the correct tempo to.

  • I really use a lot of font styles, e.g. italicizing, underlining and bolding. I’d describe my methodology for employing these styles as very vibes-based, with no real strict convention. This said, italics are generally reserved as a way for me to emphasize words as I would do if I was actually speaking them in conversation. Bolded terms are meant to highlight the main point or topic of a paragraph / section. More recently, I’ve also started underlining things and don’t really have a specific usecase for when I typically deploy it.

  • I love links. I spend a lot of time linking out to things locally within a page (to a section anchor for example), internally to my site as well as externally across the web. These links are typically inline, rather than explicit URLs or list(s) of references.

  • My life is very list-driven, the way I think is often very list-based, and so it follows that my writing features a lot of lists. This blog post is essentially one big list!

  • I do a lot of parenthetical asides. For whatever reason, I very-frequently (and am literally going to do it right here) inject my own commentary and bonus context smack-dab in the middle of my sentences. When doing so, I tend to italicize the aside 🤷‍♂️.

  • This one really bugs me - I have the annoying habit of using “it’s” when I just need to say “its”. This site has seen it since it’s inception…

  • I’m too often unsure of whether I should use the word “their” or “there”. (But don’t worry, I’m good on when to use “they’re” 😄). There’s (⬅️ this one right?) gotta be a way to easily remember which to use…

  • I use a lot of e.g.’s and i.e.’s (I’m sure incorrectly in many cases) and though I’ve looked up their meanings many-a-time (e.g. literally as I write this) I always seem to forget the distinction shortly after (i.e. I often can’t remember even after just reading the definitions of the two terms). So, for current and future me, e.g. stands for “exempli gratia” or “for example” and i.e. stands for “id est” which means “in other words”. SMUSH IT INTO YOUR BRAIN~!!

  • HTML supports 6 Section Heading elements, h1 through h6. I’m somewhat inconsistent in how I deploy them in my posts, it’s all very vibes-ey. I’d say most of the time I stick with a standard h1 for main sections across the site, but sometimes I’ll just start with h2 instead, with no h1 as a parent section at all. Best I can explain is that sometimes I feel a post might not “deserve” a section capitalized by the largest header? I suspect this particular quirk is often seen across my short-form notes.

  • I’m super inconsistent about grammatically sticking to first-person or second-person. You’ll notice this quite often I’m sure.

  • Rather than just ending a paragraph or section gracefully with a period, I’ll often just end it with a nice set of ellipsis. Usually this denotes that the next section, paragraph, list, image, or whatever is directly related to what I was just talking about. Like with many of my writing peculiarties, I’m sure it’s not being used correctly…

  • Though I think I’ve started to improve on this, my blog posts (and other content) has never employed a large amount of pictures or graphics. The reason for this is simple - there’s quite a bit of overhead to add images to posts within my static site generator workflow.

  • Mirrorin’ my own in-speech linguistic tendencies once more, I do a lot of “G-dropping”, i.e. when a the ‘g’ is dropped in words that end in ‘-ing’. So in other words, I do a lot of G-droppin’. (You’ll notice here that I almost always add that li’l apostrophe when I do a G-drop.)

  • Emojis. Another more recent addition to my writing flare, I like to add a bit of evocation to my prose 😎.

  • Text walls / monolithic paragraphs are a staple of shellsharks.com. Honestly, I’ll admit that I really don’t know when to break paragraphs up sometimes. I apologize to your eyeballs.

  • I’ll repeat, I love writing and really enjoy tinkering around on this site. I’m passionate about this stuff, so I tend to get real excited and do a lot of exclamation points!

  • In reading this, or any of my other posts, would you say the tone is “conversational”? I try to use a lot of questions like these in my writing to help make it so.

That’s it for now! A lot of these call-outs are stylistic choices, while others are admittedly just bad habits or writing deficiencies that over time I’d like to eradicate. Thanks for sticking with me through all of ‘em!