Have you played any, or are you a fan of, interactive fiction? If so, and you haven’t played this particular game before, I recommend you look at The Gostak. It’s an entire story written using standard IF principles and conventions, only every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb has been changed to be semantically unrecognizable but syntactically familiar to an English speaker. It is based on a thought experiment from The Meaning of Meaning; in short, the meaningless sentence “The gostak distims the doshes” allows you to generate three interconnected floating beliefs, one about the gostak, one about distimming, and one about doshes.
The core of language and communication is common convention. If your intent is to create a visually-pleasing pattern of pixels on a screen or ink on paper, you can change any part of your writing you like. You can change every word to a made-up word that only uses half-height letters, use the capital X as your sentence-ending punctuation, and as long as the story is internally consistent, people could still conceivably generate meaning from it. If they try hard enough, they might even generate the meaning you intended, but you would by necessity have a smaller audience.
Is your primary goal to communicate your ideas to others using a common language, or is it to create visual artwork? No matter your personal feelings on the aesthetics of different parts of the language, if you violate conventions, all you’re doing is harming the former in favor of the latter.
This viewpoint assumes that this convention makes it easier to communicate ideas. This is not true a priori, and certainly false for some conventions (that against splitting infinitives for instance).
In this case, I think you are wrong and that the convention is not sufficiently widely known/accepted to aid in communication.
I also had the same reaction. I had to re-read the three sentences a couple of time to convince myself it was the hero who said them all.
The convention also seemed weird when I started reading English — my native language uses different conventions for dialogue, not involving quotes — but now I find it “non-standard” uses (like yours) confusing.
I had trouble reading it too. If you really don’t want to do it like that, then at least just take out all the quotes except for at the very beginning and end of the speech (no quotes at all between paragraphs).
I’ve heard that theory and it’s so grotesquely ugly in a case like this that I just can’t bring myself to go along with it.
Well, it certainly gave me a good strong confusing. You could at least append a ”,′ he continued.” or something.
Have you played any, or are you a fan of, interactive fiction? If so, and you haven’t played this particular game before, I recommend you look at The Gostak. It’s an entire story written using standard IF principles and conventions, only every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb has been changed to be semantically unrecognizable but syntactically familiar to an English speaker. It is based on a thought experiment from The Meaning of Meaning; in short, the meaningless sentence “The gostak distims the doshes” allows you to generate three interconnected floating beliefs, one about the gostak, one about distimming, and one about doshes.
The core of language and communication is common convention. If your intent is to create a visually-pleasing pattern of pixels on a screen or ink on paper, you can change any part of your writing you like. You can change every word to a made-up word that only uses half-height letters, use the capital X as your sentence-ending punctuation, and as long as the story is internally consistent, people could still conceivably generate meaning from it. If they try hard enough, they might even generate the meaning you intended, but you would by necessity have a smaller audience.
Is your primary goal to communicate your ideas to others using a common language, or is it to create visual artwork? No matter your personal feelings on the aesthetics of different parts of the language, if you violate conventions, all you’re doing is harming the former in favor of the latter.
From the few minutes I’ve seen of it it looks amazing. If anyone wishes to play it here’s A link
This viewpoint assumes that this convention makes it easier to communicate ideas. This is not true a priori, and certainly false for some conventions (that against splitting infinitives for instance).
In this case, I think you are wrong and that the convention is not sufficiently widely known/accepted to aid in communication.
I also had the same reaction. I had to re-read the three sentences a couple of time to convince myself it was the hero who said them all.
The convention also seemed weird when I started reading English — my native language uses different conventions for dialogue, not involving quotes — but now I find it “non-standard” uses (like yours) confusing.
Oh, well, the author gets to pick :-)
I had trouble reading it too. If you really don’t want to do it like that, then at least just take out all the quotes except for at the very beginning and end of the speech (no quotes at all between paragraphs).
Agree. Nonetheless, seperate quotations usually mean seperate speakers.
I wonder if a solution could be “X continued, ‘blah blah’”
Or do something really sensible but alien and quote the whole block with > or Lua-style [[...]]
Yes, the only logical course is to remove all except the outer two quotation marks.