Forum: Author Hangout

As such, it was probably broken up at a specific character count to prevent another line of only a few characters. I tend to write LONG titles, so to prevent that problem, I insert individual line-breaks so the entire title is properly centered on the page.

In most cases, you use hyphenation to link a multiple adjective or adverb, so show that it's a single adjective or a single adverb, which is no distinction is the hyphen is randomly placed, not following any logic at all.

When I opted for speed reading and typing classes, I was already ahead of everyone else in the classes, but instead of slacking off, I took it as a personal challenge, as I ended up reading 5,000 words a minute and typing at 500wpm.

However, being older now, my fingers are no longer quite so nimble and my eyesight is also less good (as you age, your eyes elongate, becoming more elliptical than round, which inherently limits you visual perceptions.

That was the purpose of most modern keyboards, as they spaced the most-used keys where they wouldn't interfere with each other, so it was mostly the less used key which would.

By the way jimq2, back in the day, we all went through that progression, as they were the only typewriters available at the time, and as something new came along with new features, we'd all leap onto the newest version.

Keyboarding focuses on what each key does, including those annoying function keys, rather than learning how to type rapidly and efficiently. So keyboarding classes never never helped the many two-fingered typists.

So once those classes were first introduced, typing speeds dramatically fell and have never risen since.

including those annoying function keys

This statement tells me pretty much everything I need to know.

Boy, that brings back memories. I was also the only boy taking typing in the ninth grade, a choice I was very happy with later in life. The teacher, a grumpy middle-aged woman, often forgot I was there, addressing the class as "ladies" or "girls".

My favorite moment happened during the second week of classes. We were all pounding away at some basic keying exercise while the teacher walked around the room watching. Finally, she had seen enough. She stormed to the front of the room and declared, "I've been trying and trying to get you girls to touch type, but you're all still just hunt-and-peckers."

The room was silent for a few seconds, then one girl giggled, and it was all over. The classroom erupted in laughter, while I slunk down in my seat, trying to turn invisible.

Of these, only Eng-lish is considered correct.

If there were a verb meaning to make something into a glish, that would be hyphenated as "en-glish."

Back when people considered themselves to be "Engles" it may have been correct to use engl-ish. (To anticipate certain other commenters, the most virtuous of these were called "right Angles," and a baby might be "a cute Angle," but most of them insisted on replying to every question with puns, and were referred to as "obtuse Angles.")

It is only correct to hyphenate as E-nglish if you mean the online or electronic version of nglish.

With an em-dash instead of a hyphen, someone might say, "I'm taking a course in the Department of Engli-- Sh! I heard someone!"

I can think of no case where it would be correct to write englis-h. There is also no benefit to hyphenating in a way that doesn't make the line shorter.

There is also no benefit to hyphenating in a way that doesn't make the line shorter.

For typesetting and handwriting hyphens, I thought the point was to show the word would continue on the next line.

AJ

Yes, that is correct. What I meant was that hyphenating in a way that only moves one letter to the next line serves no purpose: having "Englis-" on the line takes just as much space as having "English" does.

Having given it a little more thought, if the font is not monospaced, that might save you a fraction of an en (an en being the width of the letter n in the selected font). If there is punctuation at the end of the word, as in, "I only speak English," then you may save a little more. Despite that, I think style guides say that you need at least two letters before the hyphen and at least two letters after.

Technically, those are known as en- and em- dashes, as that's where those spacings are most essential, visually. En-dashes are what you use to list times and dates, while em-dashes are used for asides, referring to something completely different, and thus not related to the rest of the sentence, so the extra length was a visual warning that the two sentence fragments weren't linked to the rest of the sentence.

I was always focused on typesetting, as that determines how much fits on each page, and even eBooks have white-space along the margins, which actually increases reading speeds. And since I formatted my own books, I was always quite conscious of it, as it can change a 50-page story into either 30 or 70 pages, which directly affects the stories readability.

as it can change a 50-page story into either 30 or 70 pages, which directly affects the stories readability.

and printing costs.

Precisely, yet each mainstream publisher has their own standards and thus are largely hamstrung when it comes to modifying them as their costs dramatically increase.

However, since I mainly offer eBooks, there are no fixed costs, as selling 3,000 is no more expensive than selling one, as all those fixed costs are upfront, getting it ready to publishing. While being a self-published author, I handle all of those decisions, making it vastly easier to adjust things. And when someone does want a printed document, Amazon KDP makes that surprisingly easy to do, as long as you know what you're doing.

Which is why so many are reluctant to even attempt it themselves. I have offered to help other SOL authors, yet when I get into the specifics, their go blank and they quickly find a reason to abandon the effort.

And frankly, it is an intimidating process, so I mostly just use an existing story as a template, making the necessary adjustments rather than setting then up again, from scratch and from memory.

Especially because now, I have more abandoned stories than I do published ones. And for my thirty-three published novels, that doesn't include those I later voluntary 'unpublished'.

After a while, the sheer volume of my works, published and unpublished, are simply too massive to manage, so I merely shove them all into a dark corner of my hard-drive, where I can always look them up when needed, as they're all backup on private online-storage sites.