How to write properly, on forum and elswhere

This topic gives hows and whys of writing on danbooru. It's locked because it's not intended to be a place for discussion, but a reference.

If you want to add something, please open a new thread, it will be then merged in as appropriate.

First of all, be sure you should be writing at all. Do you have something interesting to say? Can't your question be answered in 15s by just looking at the forum? In particular, do *not* ask things that have just been asked a thread below, and do *not* ask questions that have just been answered or that you can already read from the easily available information. That, in particular, means no "zOMG ARIST PLZ" or "how do I downloaded mp3?" in comments if the answer's been already posted.

And remember that tags and source box also count as "answered". If you can't even read this much, you really should be spending your time in the first grade, and not on a site full of adult content.

[The post below is courtesy of LaC, adapted from forum #2017]

It might seem an unimportant nitpick, but there are good reasons for insisting on proper capitalization, punctuation, and spelling:

- It makes what you write easier and more pleasant to read for other users. If you're going to make posts in the forums or in the comments section, we don't want them to be annoying to read.

- By contrast, choosing to write sloppily denotes a lack of consideration for others. It's like saying "The tiny effort I save by not pressing a couple keys is worth more than the time you waste as you try to make sense of my mess of jumbled-together sentences."

- When you visit a new place, you would do well to follow the local norms, especially after you're explicitly asked to. If you went to Japan, would you not take off your shoes when entering a house? If you said "we don't do *that* in America" and walked in without taking them off, it would be a grave act of disrespect towards your hosts.

- From past experience with other users, there is a strong correlation between poor writing and poor behaviour. This might be due to a lack of maturity, or of education, or of respect for the community. Whatever the reason, it's a big warning flag.

As apparently not everyone is familiar with the latest achievements in typography, here's a quick and easy guide to punctuating your posts properly. It's simple, fun, and makes mods just so much less likely to go ballistic when reading the forum.

So, let's begin:

1. Fullstop
That little fella lives on the bottommost row of the alphabetic keys, a little bit to the right of M. On the same row you can also find his buddy, the Shift key. Together, they fight crime and help separate sentences. Note that fullstop is only that one key, it's not the long flat one at the very bottom, nor is it this funny ⏎ one to the right, though you still need both (read on to learn why!)

2. Comma
Now, with the basics in place, we can tackle the advanced topics. Comma lives right next to fullstop. With it, you can perform unheard of feats of clarity and grammatical correctness. How? Well, it's easy, you do it by observing the rules of English grammar, which in turn stem from the simple desire to separate clauses for easier reading and clearer structure. Such as in:

"In my opinion, comma is the best thing ever, maybe discounting fullstops."

3. Space, semicolon and return
Now we're talking sophisticated. Space is really useful, use it not only to separate words, but remember also to put one space after (not before!) commas and fullstops. With semicolon, you can build really complex sentences, full of clauses, that nevertheless stay readable and comprehensible. With return, you can advance to the next line. And what happens if you press it twice? That's right, you've just made a paragraph! Paragraphs are good, be sure to use paragraphs.

4. Question and exclamation mark
Now here's a mystery. Unlike all the other, neglected punctuation marks, those two get a lot of exposure, too much in fact. It might be confusing that both ? and ! have a dot in them, but don't be tricked, those are not just another way to spell a fullstop. Use them to pose a question or exclaim something, respectively. And remember that one of each is plenty enough already, you can't make things more questioning or exclaiming by stacking more punctuation on them. Or maybe you can, but then it becomes really shrieky, which hurts our delicate ears, and that in turn gets us all angry and likely to bitchslap you. So better don't.

5. Tips and tricks
When writing a post, you want others to read it, right? And if you want others to, why not take a moment and read it yourself, to make sure it resembles a well written post more than a stinky pile of dog poo? Believe me, stinky poo is no fun to read. And your intertubes could get clogged with poo, and that's just no good. So make sure you never send stinky poo, but always proper posts.

Don't use emoticons unless there's a specific meaning you wish to convey with one that can't be properly expressed with words. In particular, using multiple / random / "cute" anime-style emotes sprinkled all over the place is *not* good. Doubly so if you neglect giving any thought to what you write and replace structure in your post with "..." and emoticons.