Writing for the military stifled me. I had been taught, at Santa Ana College, to mind my colons and semicolons and leave the dashes alone.
I almost caused my company to miss a deadline for printing, arguing over a blessed dash. The military, not unlike the Vatican, shuns progress. They do not like semi-colons and adore the simplicity of the m-dash. I wanted to use a semicolon in a complex sentence.
Later on, when our publications officer quit, I assumed editorial responsibilities for a set of documents. I insisted on the use of styles, boxes and a font other than Courier or Arial. We won kudos from the Air Force.
Later, 'On Writing,' by Stephen King, recommended the m-dash as the fiction writer's friend.
I changed my ways.
Now, several models of Windows, Office, and Word later; I can no longer find an m-dash on my character map.
The same problem has arisen with the ellipsis.
When I save my documents as web pages, m-dashes and ellipsis convert to '3/4' characters.
To complicate things, m-dashes and ellipsis entered before some mysterious period in time convert correctly.
Since I cannot run a replace all on a character that does not exist, I am forced to manually search and replace.
What gives???
No comments:
Post a Comment