Okay, here’s something that’s been bugging me lately. If you’re writing prose fiction, you can do whatever you want; however, when it comes to technical writing – like, say, rules for a game – I’m seeing a whole lot of people abusing asides in ways that make the text difficult to follow. Absolutely, you should change things up for variety in your technical writing, lest you end up with something that reads like stereo instructions, but misusing asides can mislead readers about the context and importance of the information they contain.
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?
* Footnotes are also a safe place for self-indulgent snark, mostly because nobody actually reads them.
Hey, unpopular opinion, apparently. But people don’t just “have pain for no reason” doctors say this all the time (especially to women and chronically ill people) and the truth is, Thats literally not possible. Even if your pains are psychosomatic (a word I hesitate to even use because of the way its used so often) there is a reason you are having those pains whether its mental illness, abuse, etc. If your doctor consistently tells you that “well some people just have pain for no reason” get a new doctor. That’s a doctor who is not going to give a shit what your actual symptoms or experiences are.
I just wanna add to clarify the psychosomatic thing.
That word DOES NOT MEAN you’re making it up. It doesn’t mean you’re imagining the symptom. What it means is that the symptom ISN’T DIRECTLY CAUSED BY ANY OF THE THINGS THAT WOULD NORMALLY CAUSE IT.
I fought to get a PCOS diagnosis for 2 and a half years. For the ENTIRE time I was fighting, I was dealing with 3 cysts that were not going away by themselves and eventually required surgery to remove. At one point close to the end of the battle, I suddenly went blind. I was visiting my parents and was standing on the veranda looking out over the tree we had planted in memory of my dog and suddenly I got one of the shooting pains that I was quite frankly used to at that point and my vision started to go dark. It was like the sun was setting while being completely hidden behind storm clouds but it was 2pm in the middle of Summer on a clear day. Within about 30 seconds I couldn’t see ANYTHING. I was 27 years old and I was screaming for my mother.
My mum raced me to her doctor (he was a 15 minute drive away as opposed to 45 minutes to the nearest hospital) and he quickly worked out that there was nothing wrong with my eyes and what had happened was totally unrelated to them. Then he said it was psychosomatic and I freaked out, yelling that I was NOT making this up and I definitely wasn’t imagining it. Very quickly he calmed me down and said he believed me and I had misunderstood. He explained that whatever was going on with my abdominal pains (he suggested PCOS which I hadn’t even heard of at that point) had been ignored for so long that my body was starting to do things other than the normal pain response to try to draw my attention to the problem. My sight going was my body basically jumping around in front of me going “HEY ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME HELLLOOOOOOO??????”
He gave me some prescription strength painkillers and my sight started to come back as soon as they started to kick in. About 45 minutes after it started I could see well enough to walk around without help and within a day and a half I was back to normal. On top of that I finally had a scan booked to figure out what the hell was causing all the pain.
Psychosomatic symptoms are NOT imagined or fabricated or happening for “no reason”. Experiencing them DOES NOT make you a liar. It makes you someone who has been battling with something serious for so long that your own body has started to get impatient with you.
I completely agree. Thank you for sharing this.
Psychosomatic symptoms are literally your body flipping random alarm switches just to get any alarm blaring because you’ve been ignoring the regular ones
“skip dinner and become thinner” more like “skip dinner and you have an eating disorder please get help”
“a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips” more like “a moment on the lips is okay to have, please take care of yourself in this lifetime”
“every time you eat you delay becoming skinnier” more like “every time you eat you give your body the nutrients it needs in order to survive, please keep surviving”
“you’ll be able to wear whatever you want when you get to your ugw” more like “you’ll be able to wear whatever you want now because fashion =/= weight”
“Don’t reward yourself with food your not a dog” more like treat yourself because you’re amazing and deserve happiness
This is actually really helpful thanks
I love this post for how it politely demolishes destructive pro ana/mia mantras i love it
“if you can pinch an inch” congrats you have skin and flesh like all humans
I… I… thanks… for sharing this cause I needed a lot.. hopefully anyone who follows me and needs can benefit from it too…
I really wish this was a thing I saw a few years ago, but I’m glad it’s circulation is moving strong. Just like you my wonderful followers <3<3<3 be brave darlings, I believe in you
Take care of yourself, guys. Eating is good for you, your body needs it or it will shut down. If you feel like you need to get healthier or lose weight, there’s tons of ways you can do that, that doesn’t put your body in danger. NEVER STARVE YOURSELF
Friendly reminder that the intro to Lion King….the non english bits leading up to the “circle of life” is not random yelling in *Africa voice* it is an actual language, Zulu, spoken by 10 million people, it is the most widely spoken language (out of 11) in the country of South Africa (1 out of the 54 countries in the continent of Africa, the continent home to somewhere between 1500-2000 languages and around 3000 distinct ethnic groups)
this isn’t to say that you have to friggin learn the language to sing along with a disney film, it just means that you should be mindful, respectful, appreciative and respectful. don’t be yelling out whatever noise comes in to your head when you hear it
Ok but someone knows what does this say?
The lyrics before the english comes in…in “circle of life”
Nants ingonyama bagithi baba [Here comes a lion, Father] Sithi uhm ingonyama [Oh yes, it’s a lion]
Nants ingonyama bagithi baba [Here comes a lion, Father] Sithi uhm ingonyama [Oh yes, it’s a lion] Ingonyama [It’s a lion]
Siyo Nqoba [We’re going to conquer]
Ingonyama Ingonyama nengw’ enamabala [A lion and a leopard come to this open place] (repeats)
[queue English lyrics]
I would like to further add that language has there own cultural nuances so something that can sound extremely meaningful in one languages may not sound as majestic when translated to another (I know this as someone who has an understanding of 5 languages and speaks 3 of them fluently) so if you are thinking “oh it ain’t that deep they are just yelling: the lion is coming!” dial it back
Worth noting that “lion” and especially the word Ingonyama is a very respectful word to talk about a Zulu king, especially in praise. It’s so heavily associated with royalty in isiZulu that a different word is used for an animal lion – Ibhubesi. This isn’t just announcing the arrival of an animal, it’s celebrating the arrival (or coronation?) of the king
hello friends! let me take you on a journey. a journey about how i unknowingly, and very much unintentionally, released a fake terry pratchett quote into the wilderness of the internet, where it’s been roaming free for nearly 3 years.
the v. short version: in january 2016 i reblogged a post and commented in the tags that it reminded me of something terry pratchett said about the use of satire. terry pratchett said something to that effect somewhere that i can’t source because i didn’t stop to write it down, it’s just something that stayed with me. it could have been an interview, or a non-fiction piece, or even a scene in one of the discworld books. i honestly don’t know. but he never said those exact words. i made a throwaway comment in the tags of a tumblr post, which later got picked up and reblogged, eventually hit twitter and has been thrown around social media as a legit terry pratchett quote since.
before i move into the long version where i try to document how this happened, i want to clarify two things:
1. i’ve been aware that quote was on twitter for a while, but never realized the extent to which it had spread – for reasons i’m going to explain in a bit. it first came to my attention in october 2016 when i got an ask about the origin of the quote. the problem is by then i’d lost track of the original post, so i had no hard evidence that my tags were the source. you can see how going around all ‘yeah i accidentally made up a terry pratchett quote and now it got famous but i have no proof to back up my claim’ wouldn’t fly with most people. now that i found that post again, i can try to fix the situation.
2. i feel very guilty about this. i realize there’s no way for anyone to control how things spread on social media, but all the same, i want to make it clear: this was not intentional. i admire and love terry pratchett, and the discworld series was formative for me as a teenager and young adult. misattributing a quote to him – a quote that doesn’t even sound like it came from him – is just about the worst thing i could think of doing as a long-time reader and fan. so, while i realize that this wasn’t something i could have predicted or controlled, i would like to apologize all the same.
the timeline:
1. january 2016: i reblogged this post and commented in the tags about how it reminded me of terry pratchett’s idea about the object of satire – again, the one i can’t source because i never wrote it down or bookmarked it. all i can say clearly is that he did not say those exact words. they come from my tags:
my tags were later copy-pasted by someone into their own reblog of that post, and made their way into the reblog stream (note that the post has nearly 400k reblogs/likes). this is a pretty common practice on tumblr.
2. march 2016: here’s a tweet that picked up the tags as a direct quote and got some 2.7k retweets. there might be earlier ones too, i don’t know if this is the original post that carried the quote to twitter. at this point i was not yet aware of what was going on. there are some comments already questioning whether the quote came from terry pratchett himself because, well, it doesn’t sound like terry pratchett. at all.
3. october 2016: i got a message asking for the source of the quote. this is the first time it came to my attention that it had reached twitter and was seeing a bit of traffic, but again, since i’d lost the original post i had no evidence to show that it came from me. all i could do at that point was to admit that yes, i did make a comment about it, but it wasn’t a direct terry pratchett quote.
i kind of. left alone it after that. partly because i felt couldn’t explain it any better than i already had without solid evidence, and partly because i never realized it would later take off as much as it did.
4. january 2018: quote started circulating a lot more. as far as i can tell, this tweet may have started the upsurge in traffic, with 23k retweets (again, there might be others, this is just the first thing that shows up when you google the quote).
5. between january 2018 and now: it’s spread to facebook, reddit, pinterest, several tumblrs and wordpress/blogspot blogs (here’s one trying to source it) and even linkedin, for cryin’ out loud.
i found this out recently, after i decided on a whim to check if there was still something going on with the quote. then a friend here on tumblr helped me finally track down the original post/tags so i could put all of this together.
hey vrabia, what do you plan to do about it?
after posting this, i’m going to try and get in touch with shaula evans and ask if she’s willing to tweet about this explanation. unfortunately there’s nothing much i can do aside from that. i’m not on twitter and don’t have an especially large following on tumblr. i’m going to put this in the terry pratchett/disworld tags, in hopes that more people see it, and i would appreciate if you reblogged it.
finally, a small reminder:
what happened here was the internet equivalent of a post-it scribble that fell behind my desk being picked up without my knowledge and published on the front page of a newspaper. please understand that, while i do feel uncomfortable about the whole thing for personal reasons, i’m not responsible for what gets shared where.
i wanted to make this post out of respect for terry and what his work means to me. if you feel like commenting/messaging me about this at any point, please keep the ‘it wasn’t intentional’ bit in mind and be considerate.
oh my days Vrabia this is magnificent and I can see the funny side.
I think somebody may have said something once, about how “a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its boots on,” but oh my goodness me, who could ever be bothered to look something like that up, before running off with it… 😉
And it really isn’t your fault. (The flip side of the coin is that people have stolen your words without your permission/knowledge or credit, misattributed them, and used them to go viral, gathering notes and attention, without giving you any benefit.)
I am tagging @petermorwood in the hopes of making him laugh!
… srsly whe you look at the responses you can see that some people just didn’t read the explanation properly, and still want to blame the op and/or find someone to ‘properly attribuate’ the quote to.
ffs people.
Hey, congrats OP, you managed to sum up the entire essence of Terry Pratchett so well your tags got misunderstood as an actual direct quote from a literary genius and then took on a life of its own, which was also one of his favorite themes to write about– the evolution of words and stories that make up the sum of who we are.
There’s a common phrase amongst older Discworld fans, you don’t see it so much on tumblr but you’ll see it on pins at conventions or on Facebook groups, which is “Be More Terry”, by which we mean, be kinder, be thoughtful, speak up about injustice, improve upon yourself and leave the world better than how you found out–and try to do it with a sense of humor if you can. And frankly I can’t think of a more Be More Terry moment than to make more people realize that satire is a tool intended to punch up at power, and not to punch down while your words run away from you and take on a life of their own.
Quite frankly I think he’d be proud of you for grasping it so well, and for making others aware of it.
As for everyone jumping on your case, they’ve clearly never had a post go viral or know what it’s like to have the Internet rip something you’ve said so far out of context that pinning it back down is like attempting to herd cats.
One of my quotes about fear gets misattributed to being from Dune all the time. I’ve seen my own words go past me here on tumblr with a famous author’s name attached multiple times, and half the comments are people irate that it’s not the actual quote and then when they find out it’s from me, acting like somehow I lied and said it was from Dune, even though it very clearly came from a personal post where someone just lifted my words out, posted it as “anon” and then someone else said “this reminds me of Dune” so then the hivemind said “ah, must be from Dune then” and that was that. I see that quote maybe once a month, and there’s nothing I can do about it anymore. it’s outwith my control. Because no matter how many times I make the correction, it’s lost in the notes.
So again, I reiterate, if your first reaction to this post is to knee jerk and be mean to the OP one: that’s not Being Very Terry Of You, and two: you don’t understand tumblr very well, or just how muddy a game of telephone the whole reblog system is. You can say the sky is blue in your tags, and someone else will misatribute them as red, and suddenly that becomes your legacy.
So good on you for owning to it OP. You did so knowing that people were likely going to be horrible about it, and you did it anyway. That’s all you can do. Anyone attempting to drag you over hot coals over it needs to chill.
To all of the anti-captivity people out there who claim that animals should be free, taken back to the wild, I challenge you with one question-
Where is that wild?
Its not in Borneo. Its not in South Africa. Even our oceans are being destroyed.
I am a zookeeper and i would love nothing more than my animals to be in the wild, free. But before that happens, I need them to be safe. And what with deforestation, poachers, climate change and people, there is no more wild anymore.
So I urge you all instead of petitioning zoos and animal care facilities, start by not using palm oil products. Start spreading the word about the rhino plight. Educate yourselves. Stop trying to shut down these places that do good and take good care of their animals and start worrying about the ones left in the wild, because they are the ones in trouble. They are the ones who need help.
May your demons slumber and your wine glass be full
The holiday stag is back!!
I did this design two years ago and every year it’s gone viral without crediting me. There’s another Tumblr account here that has 300000 notes on it and the original poster didn’t credit me meaning I’ve lost out in a ton of potential sales. Pleeeease, if you retweet or repost an artists work, credit them! It helps them so much! Every penny I make comes from my artwork!
Frankenuff’s Castle 