You’re grammar are bad.
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But the point here is not (at least not solely) how to correctly judge Walt’s actions. If you want to learn about ethics, go study the trolley problem. What the show is trying to convey is how Walt the character makes choices and particularly how he does things that are evil while still being the protagonist and hero of his own story. The specific way he killed Jane is central to how he manages that balancing act psychologically. To put it another way, I don’t the the character would make nearly as much sense if he had deliberately poisoned Jane’s drugs. It’s really important to the story that he killed her in a way that was “accidental-but.”
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If there’s one thing I learned from kelhus on 22 - it’s that nazi’s always has an apostrophe.
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Here’s another example:
“But the backpacker looked hungry - so I offered her the third box.”
En-dash between words?
- Always ok
- Never ok
- Ok on forums but not in a book
- Other (explain)
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Crap I didn’t mean to vote - oh well.
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“—but the backpacker looked hungry, so I offered her the third box.” Seems like the way to write that.
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He had gale. Honestly he truly cared for Jesse. He could have easily had gus kill Jesse or let Jesse die to those two gangsters but he cared about him
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The hyphen after Macaw Mountain should definitely just be a comma. Using a dash or a colon tends to make the text that follows more visually disconnected from the text before. That’s the opposite of what you want here, where it’s an appositive that’s important to the meaning of the passage. I’m not confident of this, but I have a feeling that the sentence would be better balanced if you either punched up the main body of it (perhaps replace “headed over to nearby” with something more detailed and concrete) or trimmed down the appositive and moved some of the content to its own sentence, and just introduce Macaw Mountain as “the bird sanctuary Macaw Mountain.”
I’m also not a fan of the emdashes around “especially the Maya of Copan.” That phrase is too important to the meaning of the sentence to be an aside. Feels like another situation where you just need two sentences. Sentence #1 is about how indigenous groups prized the macaw. Sentence #2 is an illustration that the bird was so prestigious to the Maya of Copan that their first king called himself Resplendent Macaw rather than Furious Leopard or something.
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There were quite a few characters on the show (and on Better Call Saul) who would have killed Jesse before the end of S2 just to tie up loose ends. Guy knows a lot and is kind of a mess.
Yeah. I know that commas seem humble, but they exist for a reason.
What’s wild is that it seems like a spot where you’d put the dash at the beginning?
Wait Jesse is in better call Saul? I stopped around season 2
Yeah, this. For inexplicable reasons, Walt cares for Jesse. He could have gotten rid of him multiple times, yet he never does, and on occasion goes against his own interests to save Jesse.
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Checking in on Tony Bourdain. He seems to use em-dashes pretty much everywhere I’m using space-en-dash-space.
http://subwayreads.org/book/medium-raw/
And then sometimes just goes bananas with punctuation:
I guess if you’re already a TV personality and almost everyone who reads your second book already has your voice in their head - you can get away with that.
Everyone should read Chapter 3 in that - funniest thing I’ve ever read. I aspire some day to write a chapter anywhere near that good.
I can’t seem to pull off a bunch of medium-length sentences in a row without it sounding stilted - at least not in expository prose. So I tend to mix in long sentences and short sentences (or sometimes only long).
Like with imagine these two sentences: “The scarlet macaw is the national bird of Honduras.” or “Local residents know the scarlet macaw by its traditional name - guacamaya.” I just can’t find a way to not have them sound awkward anywhere in the paragraph. So I get a little twisted into a pretzel mixing them into clauses.
Yeah I’ll probably end up rewriting that paragraph a dozen more times on top of the dozen I’ve already tried. Sometimes the best is to just take a break then come back later.
Other: no idea - people are doing their own thing while criticizing others for doing their own thing… there are no real rules because there’s nobody who decides what they are and there’s no place the official rules are written down and no effective enforcement mechanism. Otoh we let Trump get away with grammar infractions and look what that led to.
After reading Kitchen Confidential, even I complained about the poor and inconsistent editing.
That’s because the property punctuation in most of those instances is an em dash (or parentheses).
But also anyone getting up in arms about em dash vs en dash vs hyphen when referring to forum posts is an ass
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This is for my book - not sure if you caught that.
No there are lots of people who would have killed him in Walt’s position is what I meant.
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