Writing Wrongs

Everyone has a "writing style": turns of phrase, idiosyncratic grammatical constructione, particular words always misused or misspelled, particular grammar errors, not to mention the culture-wide abuse of things like "there, their, they're" and the apostrophe. The Internet, with its acronyms and peculiar dialects, is a gallery of idiosyncratic linguistic quirks, and even encourages the creation of new ones. So I got to thinking about my own way of writing here and elsewhere on the Internet, and recognized four writing habits, mostly stuff I use too much, I have that are really annoying.

1) Overuse of *LOL* and *hehehe*. One of the handicaps of the Internet is that encourages the type of informal conversation -- via chat, blogging, IMing, etc. -- that in a pre-digital age would be strictly verbal, and verbal communication is full of intonation and body language cues to indicate things like sarcasm that are totally lacking, or at least incredibly difficult to convey, in written form. So we use smilies and *LOL*s. But over time these things lose their meaning. When I *LOL*, I very rarely am actually "laughing out loud." It's just a way of saying, "that's funny!" And sure, you can just write "that's funny" or "I'm being sarcastic," but it reads so stilted and didactic. But *LOL*s just get annoying, and, in many people's opinion, immature. I cannot figure out a better way to convey that kind of information, though, so I keep using them.

2) Overuse of "and" and "but" at the beginning of a sentence. You may have actually been taught that one cannot use "and or "but" at the beginning of a sentence. This is a prescriptivist, pedantic lie; one can and naturally do use them. But I use them this way too much, I think, particularly "and." It's a function of my propensity to want to get all my thoughts out there, and, since I'm an overthinker, so it comes out as a string of "and another thing!" I could use "Also" more, but there's something a bit antiseptic about that as a transition. So, it's annoying, but I have nothing better.

3) Overuse of parentheses. Another function of my overactive mind, my endless obsession with and need for clarification and qualification and contextualization drives me to put twice as much information in an already probably long sentence by shoving some parentheses in there. I'm just not a concise, Hemingway-esque writer; I'm into thoroughness and exhaustiveness and inclusiveness rather than concision. I'm wordy rather than terse; I revel in verbosity rather than brevity. I could just force myself to leave stuff out and focus, or at least mix it up using dashes, but meh....

4) The semi-colon is supposedly an "endangered" punctuation mark, according to experts, but not on my watch! I'm an unapologetic semi-colon booster. It's only recently that my somewhat inexplicable block with regards to comfort using commas and coordinating conjunctions other than "but" has eased, so the semi-colon was always a good way to connect two sentences together correctly. Some sentences belong together, and the semi-colon is their Justice of the Peace. Plus, I like the hybridity of the semi-colon, and it's overlooked underdog status.

So there are my bad writing habits. What about yours, dear readers?