Writing What You Don't Know: The Assistants

Grammatical question that i didn't know where else to put. Can an oxford comma be used to link together three independent clauses that are all part of the same idea? Or would I have to use a semi colon between each one?

example: [independent clause], [independent clause], and [independent clause].

 

Sounds like a job for commas, unless the clauses already contain commas of their own and that would be confusing. Hard to be totally sure without the sentence in front of me, though.

 

^ yup this! the commas are typically fine, unless the clauses are more complicated to the point it would get confusing.

"before i go on my trip, i need to pack my suitcases, i need to go to the bank, and i need to get an oil change." <-- fine with commas

"before i go on my trip, i need to pack my suitcases, though i'm not looking forward to this because it always stresses me out; i need to go to the bank because i need to get some money changed to Canadian dollars, and i heard they've got a good exchange rate; i need to get an oil change, which, in defiance of my friend who's a mechanic, i've been putting off for awhile anyway." <-- needs some semicolons to break things up to maintain clarity

 

The Rule (for "standard" [ugh] American English, anyway) is that semicolons are used to separate closely related independent clauses in the absence of coordinating conjunctions in the sentence or to separate items of a list when each item is long or contains commas.

Examples:

It was terribly cold outside, so I wore several layers under my jacket.

I would like coffee, my girlfriend would like tea, and Alaizabel would like water.

• the coordinating conjunctions "and" and "so" mean that we use commas to separate the independent clauses.

I'll have coffee; my girlfriend will have tea.

• in the absence of coordinating conjunctions, we use semicolons to separate independent clauses.

These are the cities I've lived in: Chicago, IL, where I lived for three years; Gary, Indiana, where I was born; Modesto, California, where I spent most of my life; and Reno, where I died.

• each item in the list is long and includes commas; therefore, we use a semicolon.
• this was a weird sentence, but I couldn't think of a good thing to list.

Stylistically, I've heard semicolons be described as in between a comma and a full stop. If your independent clauses aren't closely related, semicolons can be jarring--the reader expects a full stop, and instead they get something that's more like a leading pause.

edited a few times to add more examples and fix weird formatting, and once because i hit 'post' too soon

 

not really a writing question per se but kind of adjacent--does anyone have any ideas as to how to order a timeline by date without specifying any actual dates? like, I've got a story set in what is basically the irl present, but I don't want to set anything in stone to a fixed date or anything. (not sure if that makes any sense, bluh.)

 

How do you write a character who's smarter than you are without doing a Doctor Selenium?

 

So I'm doing my best to queer the scifi/fantasy binary (specifically in the context of my wizards IN SPACE fanfanfic) and I'm trying to research probably too many things at once, including both scientific knowledge and mythology on the subject of the planets, so as to assign them magical properties similar to those credited to earth. I'm not really sure what I should be asking for help with specifically. I guess organization? I'm a tad overwhelmed.

 

honestly mixing magic and scifi is always super fun so

what does magic do in your universe? what are the different ways of doing magic? is it possible for different schools to coexist, or be used together? how is it taught to new students?

 

Mostly the Harry Potter universe, plus like, actually acknowledging that other cultures would do magic differently (another thing I'm researching). So the way magic works is pretty much the intersection between intent, belief, dedicated study of what is and is not effective, and tradition. Plus the da kids have access to advanced alien technology which they are learning their way around and integrating with magic. And space travel! A vital question: does outer space hold a magic of its own?

 

ok so I have no idea what money is or how it works so, uh
About how much cash would a fairly small little corner grocery store have in the bank? About how much would their monthly costs be? How much would a store remodel cost? I think the rest I can kinda....muddle along but. Those I have no clue.

 

If a child was malnourished badly, and also had genes for being short to begin with, would they be likely to have stunted growth into adulthood, and if so, what would be the exact biological causes? Does it affect the growth hormone production, or is that produced fine but has nothing to use to build with?

 

Any tips in how to write personality differences between an actual child and a naive and slightly dim adult? There's a character my it's-complicated-guy and I share who is kind of an airhead but I want to make it clear he's still capable of meaningful consent.

 

A couple of my sisters were raised in Pageant Culture and it was made clear to them when they were kids implicitly that their only job was to marry rich so their mother could be taken care of, which is I think probably the closest modern equivalent? And one of them is a lesbian and essentially got cut loose from the whole deal when she came out, so I'm basing my answers on her, although she was a little older when this happened.

Basically I expect a lot of acting out in her future - throwing tantrums about etiquette not being followed, escalating demands about more expensive and rare fabrics or beauty materials, becoming extremely quiet and worryingly secretive for a while, that kind of thing. It's probably going to take a while to take in that her value is no longer dependent on her looks, and in the meantime she's probably going to have freakouts that she's not valuable at all since casimir visibly doesn't care. I think maybe the best thing to keep her stable without dragging the story down too much would be to give her a slightly older trusted friend - probably one from a different social class so that they'll have a different perspective - to confide in who can help her work through all this.

Spoiler: Re the seduction thing

imo, I do think it's likely that she'll think she needs to seduce someone to create an alliance to avenge her father, but I don't think it's likely to be casimir unless he's literally her only option. Given that he doesn't care about her appearance, she'll have lost a big part of what she'd consider an important part of the seduction technique. She's unlikely to start with full on seduction, though, just probably get uncomfortably flirty, and you can basically cut it off right there and have... Whoever talk to whoever is her official guardian, at which point she can probably have a crying jag at the failure of her plan and also realizing that she doesn't actually want to do so. I feel like that's... probably the best way to keep it light, or as light as something like this gets? Basically even the flirting can make her unhappy without anything explicitly or even very implicitly sexual happening.

 

Yes. Your body only produced growth hormones up to a certain point within development (often tied with sexual development, too) and there's 'growth gaps' in the long bones that allow modern medicine to give a rough mathematical estimate of how big someone'll get. Once those gaps are closed there's not that much to be done anymore because your bones do need the space to grow into.

As for the 'Why short', in case of malnourishment the issue is that your body is too busy just keeping what it has to actually add onto it. Growth happens both because the cells themselves get bigger and because there's more cells. Both requires there to be the actual resources to build with.
Additionally, and Im not sure entirely but it would make sense to me as a biologist, growth hormone production is something that the body can cut down on to conserve resources without missing out on very much (same reason menstruation cuts out below certain percentages of body fat in human females: conserving resources)

 

Thanks to everyone for the replies!

@TheOwlet That's good. One of the characters I'm remaking from years ago is a kid who went through some really awful stuff, and I always pictured her as ending up never even reaching five feet - I could have found a genetic reason but I wanted to check if malnutrition and trauma would be sufficient for that on their own.

@jacktrash Okay! The guy in question was denied entry into normal society for a long time, and is still under the wing of his moirail, so I guess to get across that he's definitely functioning on an adult level he needs an opportunity to do something without her input. We do have him holding down a job with relative ease. I need a way to get across that the guy who's occasionally fucking him thinks of him as a simpleton but not as a child, because I don't want it to be creepy.

 

I'm remaking some old characters I had as a teen, and one of them is based on my view of myself at that age. I'm not sure if I should change her to make her less like me, or if it's okay since she's not as much like how I am now and likely to develop differently. Should I also make her look different? Also, her name is both kind of clunky and a pun on my real name, and I don't really like it anymore; should I change that too?