If you're posting a question please get to know this tricky little guy: ?
I’ve seen a number of posts lately like “How to get yadda yadda yadda” but when you click, the content is actually a question about the subject line, which sucks.
If you’re posting a question, please make it look like a question. It’s EASY… Just put a QUESTION MARK at the end of your subject line. It looks like this:
One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone uses multiple question marks at the end of a statement. I’m triggered right now and reporting you for harassment. Lol
Arrrr, I’m here t’ make replicas o’ all yer punctuation!
Avast, wher’ be th’ interrobang!?
Seriously though, while this post is cute, let’s remember not everyone speaks English as a first language, and while many languages do use the English Alphabet, many do not and so there are still quite a few people unfamiliar with the proper English punctuation.
My (non-english) native language uses the question mark, but many don’t use it out of lazyness. I don’t think this is a local issue. Also, are there really that many languages that do not use a question mark? I would have thought that is the rarity.
Besides, most english content I read on lemmy are not nearly that bad to justify that.
I have to admit that I would have never imagined it’s a different character than the semicolon if I hadn’t seen those. That’s bad optimization right there!
Interesting additional info: in Greek, the role of the semicolon is played by a floating period ·
I can forgive the incorrect “How to get blah?” sentence formation, but leaving out a question mark (which are common across many languages) makes it look like purposeful clickbait.
I cannot forgive that. English is not a language that allows you to turn a statement into a question just by changing punctuation. This is covered in like day one: “What is your name?”
If you learned English through media and not formal classes, you have even less excuse, because then you should be learning how people talk in the real world, not just formal classroom English.
Actually my point was that Americans don’t always use “proper English punctuation” since they co-opted the language and then randomly changed a bunch of things for absolutely no reason.
That's great and all, but for those of us that do speak English and are expecting certain grammatical norms, eschewing those norms, regardless of the validity of the reason, makes it significantly harder for us to parse.
The question mark is not a rare piece of punctuation, either. It's used in China. It's used in Japan. It's used in Vietnamese, every Romance language I've ever encountered, and every Germanic language I've ever encountered. I'm not saying I understand all those languages, but I can certainly recognize when someone's asking a question in one because the question mark remains the same.
This is a piss-poor excuse and reeks of the attitude of one who's never encountered a language that doesn't use the Latin Alphabet even in passing. Oh yeah, by the way, it's called the Latin Alphabet, not the English Alphabet.
While Japanese indeed uses question marks, you can get screwed if you think that every sentence without a question mark at the end is not a question. For example, this is a grammatically correct question:
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