A scourge upon proper capitalization · 6:39pm May 21st, 2016
There's something I've noticed turning up a lot more lately than I used to. Lots and lots of authors have capitalization errors in dialogue tags when the quotation ends in a question mark or exclamation mark. Now, some authors have this problem anyway, but the upsurge I've seen recently is for authors who normally get it right. The errors only occur for dialogue ending in a question mark or exclamation mark.
They'll get this right:
"Hey," he said.
But they'll have this error:
"Hey!" He said.
I started to wonder why it was happening so much more when, horror of horrors, I saw one of the same errors in my own writing! That's not a mistake I ever make. So it was soon after that I caught GDocs in the act. I had not typed a capital letter on that "He," but as I hit the spacebar to finish the word, it popped to capital on its own.
So I traced it to a new "feature" Google added. If you go into the Tools menu and click on Preferences, there's a pop-up window of lots of things checked by default. The top one, "Automatically capitalize words," is fairly new.
For all that is holy, uncheck it.
Most writers have a good sense of where to capitalize and where not to, and the more obscure ways authors tend to get it wrong aren't ones this "feature" can detect anyway. So unless you're just too lazy to capitalize the beginnings of sentences on your own, this "feature" will cause you more problems than it solves. Spread the word.
These days it seems the phrase "automatic feature" is becoming synonymous with "stress inducer"
.
I suspect this is spellchecker error.
EDIT: helps if I read what I'm replying to. I've unchecked several things in GDocs, and added others.
Thanks for bringing that to attention! I usually never write in Google Docs anyway, but I'm currently collabing on a story that we write there and this is really good to know.
These kind if features, are going to do to typing, what typing did to handwriting.
A pox upon them and their 'features'
Agh.
Agh.
I cannot find useful words for this. I am so annoyed.
Thankfully, I do most of my writing offline and then throw it online already done, but still. Thanks for letting us know about this.
Oh my goodness, that is just awful.
Although it's weird, because you'd think most grammar literate people would notice a capitalization like that and correct it. Like...you're supposed to re-read your document after you've uploaded it from GDoc to Fimfiction just in case something like that does happen. I guess people have gotten ignorant or just lack the amount of fucks needed.
You are a life saver.
So how new is this wonderful feature? I've edited a lot in the past for a few people whose writings are often plagued with this (though it happened with what should be comma'd quotes as well). But you're right: a lot more of this phenomenon is cropping up in new stories. Stupid Google.
This is why I don't work in GDocs. <.<
I noticed GDocs started doing this a few weeks ago. I managed to catch and fix it most times, and after a while it stopped. I don't know if Google realized it was an error, or if their algorithms were just smart enough to pick up on what I was doing and adapt, but it doesn't seem to be a problem anymore.
(It was very annoying, though.)
There’s also the very common (and longstanding) issue of apostrophes facing the wrong way. Words like:
‘em ‘70sinstead of
’em ’70sIt’s a universal problem with pretty much all word processing software and even harder to detect, especially in the typeface FIMFiction uses for comments, blog posts, etc. (Open Sans), where the left and right quotation marks look virtually identical. However, the typeface I use to read stories (Source Serif Pro) makes it glaringly apparent.
lambda.sx/m1A.png
lambda.sx/wJL.png
I mean, it’s not as bad as confusing it’s with its, but it still bugs me for some reason.
3962356 That's something I correct in anything I review as well. It's not that hard to work around, or if the author doesn't use smart quotes (or disables them in software that does), it doesn't even come up. But yeah, it'd be very hard for software to determine whether you want an apostrophe or a single opening quotation mark. If you know it's going to happen, though, you can get in the habit of using the workarounds, like doubling the single quote, so it gives you one in each direction, then keeping the one you want.
Oh holy carp! You're a lifesaver! I thought I was going senile!
3961890
Remember all those inappropriate capitalizations you had to point out to me?
3963286
You're forgiven, now fix them. :V
I just wrote
"Hey!" he said
in gdocs, with auto-capitalization on, & it didn't change it. They must have fixed it.
3965993 I imagine they got complaints. Glad to see they fixed it, but I can't imagine it helps many people. It only knows the basic instances, and it doesn't do the opposite: making things lowercase when it thinks you've capitalized erroneously.
The auto-capitalization on iDevices can also give you this problem. Of course, BBcode confuses it.