Comma and Hyphen Police or why I hate crafting
So on top of being dyslexic, I struggle with the seeming obsession with the approver's overs commas and hyphens. While there are plenty of times commas are required and same with hyphens there are just as many times where they are optional. four poster bed or four-poster bed are both correct but the design police get fixated on the hyphens. Other times they just don't read things right A bright red strawberry is not A bright, red strawberry the comma changes the meaning and both are grammatically correct. Frankly, in both cases, the hyphens and commas do not impact anyone's understanding of the game or the item in question. BTW in both cases, Grammarly flags either as correct. Can someone please inject a little sanity into this process so that the many subjective things such as commas and hyphens don't become the issue. Focus on spelling, appropriate content, good basic grammar. But if you drop the design into Grammarly or other reputable grammar checker and it shows either is acceptable leave it the way the designer wrote it, approve it and move on.
0
Comments
You say, "My bottle is empty."
Jeremy raises an eyebrow questioningly.
Jeremy slaps you on the cheek.
I can't agree on the 'glaring' part of the errors being a necessity, but incorrect rejections are understandably infuriating. Some people also really struggle to understand the difference between style 'problems' and grammar errors. 'Four-poster' is conventionally hyphenated, but there's zero ambiguity with or without. Wiktionary can get out of here with 'fourposter' though. If someone tried to tell me to hyphenate 'bright red', I'd laugh.
On the plus side, you don't have to buy a clan to get 1 private submission a year or spend ~2c worth of gold after a 300c buyin just to submit the design.
Bright-red is hyphenated because bright is a modifier of the colour red, and not the state of the object itself. i.e the object is not bright in and of itself, it is the colour. Four-poster is hyphenated because poster in that context is an archaism and it is now the name of the bed, 'poster' is not used as a descriptor in modern English.
The accuracy of grammar and spelling in a text game like Imperian is one of the direct measures of its quality. The worse it gets the worse it reflects on Imperian as a professional product and a high quality roleplay environment.
So in this particular instance, 'bright-red' makes no sense since 'red' is a noun and 'bright' is a single adjective. All of these things can be corrected with a simple search before submitting designs. If you're not 100% sure about something, just look it up. It'll speed up your wait time in the queue, it'll make everyone's lives easier to not have to be a manual Grammarly for simple mistakes, so just Google it yawl. Or have someone proofread your stuff before submitting. (I offer this to everyone who needs it btw, but only if you pay me in diamonds.)
You say, "My bottle is empty."
Jeremy raises an eyebrow questioningly.
Jeremy slaps you on the cheek.
I will, however, fight you on misspelling 'hyphen' though.
I also made a mistake in saying 'red' was a noun and meant to say it is not a noun (proofreading matters ) That said, I've definitely fought crafters over silly rejections of my own designs and assumptions made about the origin of certain things I mention or where I drew my 'inspiration' from.
Just because someone's design reminds you of something else, it doesn't mean it's literally designed in the likeness of that thing it reminds you of. I find those rejections way more annoying than ones for hyphens or commas because they're so subjective.
bright red and bright, red work for a stoplight because a stoplight is both. It is both bright and red, and bright red. A strawberry however, as used in the context the OP had it, is not bright. Unless, for some ungodly reason, you've made your strawberry out of light. The colour of the berry is a red, that is bright (or vibrant). Therefore, bright red does not work.
Edit :For typo as I am bad at life.
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/HyphensEnDashesEmDashes/faq0075.html
But yeah, that eliminates the ambiguity argument there unless you think it's a radioactive strawberry.
This is a text game. If you don't want to be grammatically correct, then stick to doing things that aren't going to be seen by others.
@Rhyse Given your particular case, I can understand your frustration but English is a silly language. If you don't wanna go through a bunch of approval rejections cause you disagree with the necessity of certain grammatical nuances, then I'd advise finding a decent text reviewer somewhere online. Make sure your parameters match the crafting guidelines, and thank your lucky stars you're not trying to design in Achaea
Quote@CMS
Consider too that when the meanings of two versions (“dark blue tie” and “dark-blue tie”) are so close as to be indistinguishable, it might not be worth your time to worry about it.
An awful lot of you are showing a loose affiliation with actual grammar rules.
I'd also consider taking a step back on the hyphen whip-cracking for a game with a population smaller than your average 7th-grade classroom. If you want people to improve their writing game, create in-game resources to help people learn and improve. Don't sideline judge. Especially if your own understanding is questionable.
The list of things ruining Imperian is long. Hyphens aren't even in the top hundred.
Signed,
A person who gets paid to write
I also don't think it's up to IRE or whoever contributes to crafting rules to create grammar guides for people who are supposed to know how to write when they get into a tradeskill, or use it to practice their writing. There are thousands of online resources to choose from and I would think it's such a waste of admin time to spend time creating scrolls to teach people elementary-level English when basically nobody reads the crafting scrolls and tips as is (there would be less mistakes submitted if people would read them imo).
An adjective is a word that describes something. In this case, you have two adjectives - 'bright' and 'red'. When combining adjectives in this way, the general rule of thumb is 'Can you put the word and between the two adjectives and still have a comfortable, logical sounding object? So 'A bright and red strawberry'. Would anyone ever say this? 'Can you please give me a bright and red strawberry?' No. No they wouldn't. So we use a hyphen. Because a hyphen means your object actually makes sense.
I'm not an approver in Imperian, but in all honesty, if you don't think grammar matters, and you're not going to fix mistakes you make when countless people point out the logic in fixing said mistakes, then that sounds like a you problem.
Also @Dariella a lot of people get paid to write, doesn't make them good at it. Countless 'authors' can attest to that.
Red Adjective modifying strawberry.
Strawberry Noun.
You say, "My bottle is empty."
Jeremy raises an eyebrow questioningly.
Jeremy slaps you on the cheek.
Edit: Also, I never said it wasn't grammatical to say 'a bright and red strawberry'. I just said no one would actually ever say that.
I can't agree on a four-poster bed though, simply because you'd be hard pressed to find a reputable source that says it's correct without.
But you do you man. If you think you can get by the approvers, then just keep submitting it, adding in a note that you don't think the hyphen is necessary.