On Sun, Feb 07, 1999 at 07:28:43PM -0800, Adrian Tymes wrote:

Nice, but your hyphens really break up the readability.  I'd suggest
limiting hyphens to three cases:

* To break up a word that wraps around a line boundary, and only
  sparingly.  Overuse and inappropriate use of this is the main problem
  I saw, for instance:

These bloody reckon-ings were often carried
out within a secret community; one which saw its best interests maintained
in se-crecy.

  Both of the hyphens in this sentence were unnecessary; your text would
  be better off without them.

This looks to me like the sorry result of Microsoft's dain-bramaged
'SmartQuotes' feature.

A note to all writers using Microsoft Word, and possibly Wordpad, to
write: Disable SmartQuotes.  They are evil.

* To denote subclauses; these should have spaces around them to
  distinguish them from the other two cases.  For instance:

   Indeed, they had various rules about who could be killed and under what
circumstances, but in war, the humans poets?and some of their military
writers?knew better.

  Here, it should have been "poets - and" and "writers - knew"; this
  allows readers to quickly see that the words between "poets" and
  "knew" are a sentence fragment to be parsed individually, rather than
  trying to parse "poets-and" and "writers-knew" (both of which look
  like the third case).

Get thee to a grammar book and learn the difference between a hyphen
and a dash. :)

Anyways, I suspect this of being more SmartQuote-related lossage.
SmartQuotes turns a dash (which is rendered in plain ASCII as '--')
into a non-standard character, the em-dash.  Unfortunately, this is
nonstandard ASCII, so it causes all kinds of problems.  Perhaps, in
the font you're using, it's hard or impossible to tell a hyphen from
an em-dash.

(You think it looks bad on your system?  On my Linux box, it got
rendered as a question mark. :)

* To join two or more words that normally are not joined.  This one you
  do use correctly, as in:

   Mireb sighed as the thirty-year old Plymouth Horizon bounced along Route
17, plowing its way through the mid-December snow to its intersection with
the New Jersey Turnpike.

Fix this, and things should be better (or, at least, people will have an
easier time finding other ways to improve the fic).  Fail to fix this,
and many potential readers may give up when they see the grammar errors,
suspecting (incorrectly, in this case) that they warn that the fic in
general will be of poor quality.

Actually, the problem is Microsoft.  As I said, disabling SmartQuotes is
the only smart thing to do.

Anyways, I knew what the problem was as soon as I saw it, and e-mailed the
author telling him how to fix it.  I see that a reformatted version has
now appeared.

-- 
  -Sean Connor  (sec@konatsu.ml.org)
                (sec@cableregina.com)         ,,,,
                (sec@softhome.net)        ,-^^,--/
                                  _--_  .' ,-'  /    ()
                              *,,'    '/  /--------------.
   O]=========================| >     <> (           (o)  )
                              *'`,    ,\  \--------------'
                                  ^--^  '. '-,  \
                                          '-__'--\
                                              ````