Thursday 26 March 2015

Closure

Whether you read a lot of books, pore over a newspaper or magazine every day, or you just waste a lot of time reading websites of no nutritional value such as this one, there's no doubt you will have read more open brackets in your life (and other types of punctuation marks than closed ones, due to the illiteracy or forgetfulness of the authors or copy editors involved.

As long as spelling and grammar checks remain passive rather than enforced, this is a problem that doesn't seem to be going away (if anything, advances in technology have made it worse. But I can at least reduce the burden of your open bracket debt by presenting a selection of closed brackets for you to read through at your leisure.

I haven't done any research or got any kind of reliable estimate of the type of figures involved, but here's a round 500 in a neat enough square sort of shape that should at least go some way towards helping:


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))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
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If you have the nagging feeling that that wasn't enough, feel free to read through it again as many times as needed until that feeling goes away.

Don't worry if you think you might have accidentally read it too many times and have now read more closed brackets in your life than open ones, as that just means you'll have a handy stockpile to be getting on with. The open brackets will sort themselves out.


Punctuation frustration doesn't end at brackets, of course, so I've also presented a small selection of other oft-neglected marks that may be of use to you.

Here are 100 closing speech/quotation marks, because you probably won't need as many of these. You can't tell from the font, but I assure you that I typed a pair of speech marks, deleted the first and copy-pasted the second, to make sure they're oriented in the right way:


" " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " "
" " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " "
" " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " "
" " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " "
" " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " " "


Following shortly are 200 closing apostrophe's, which will likely be needed both for closing unclosed quotation's you've read and as a substitute for erroneous opening apostrophe's you've read (when an abbreviation was at the start of the word and the author/editor didn't do the thing of typing two and deleting the first one so that the remaining one faces the right direction. What is it with these people?

Apostrophe's are tricky beast's however, as you can never be certain whether youve read more instance's of people misusing them when theyre not needed or lazily omitting them when they are. Plea's consider this carefully before choosing whether or not to continue:


' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '
' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' '


Finally, here are some spaces for you to mentally insert into words that should have had one but didn't, e.g. 'alot (sorry for giving you another one. You may also want to type out as many full stops as you think are necessary to cover times they may have been missed out of abbreviations youve read, eg 'eg," but youll have todo that on your own. The same goes for italicising titles that should have been italicised and adding the missing s's from words like "italicised' written in American English, along with looking at a bunch of crossed out z's for balance. I cant do everything 4 u, im not ur mum

Blogger's formatting doesn't let me type actual spaces, so I'll just leave a large blank space and you can use your imagination to decide how many it includes if u fink ur up 2 dat:



















































I can still hear her scream

like a swiftly unzipped backpack