So I’ve just been upgraded to Tier 3 of the writing job. This means I can get more money. This is good. However.

They sent an email which, though not actually unwanted, is a bit weird. Firstly, they said that they were upgrading me to Tier 3. Then, in the next sentence, they said that I was making various errors in the texts of mine they reviewed. Well, if there are errors, why’d you upgrade me, you twits.

Anyway, it turns out that the sort of “errors” they claim are very important are actually those utterly arbitrary bits of prescriptive nonsense like “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition”, which as I understand it is simply a myth - it has never been incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition; it’s just people making up silly rules for no reason, as they so often do. There are other things as well which I had no idea about, like that they are very concerned with punctuation.

When I say punctuation, I don’t mean capital letters and full stops. No. I mean that it turns out they care about the difference between the hyphen, the en dash and the em dash. Here’s the difference:

Stuck-up grammar Nazis

Stuck–up grammar Nazis

Stuck—up grammar Nazis

Now, curiously enough, I actually do care about this sort of thing for aesthetic reasons. I like rich punctuation; it makes things more interesting. However, it surprises the hell out of me that they care about it for the work I’m doing. 

There are all sorts of other silly things they seem to care about, but I couldn’t be arsed getting into it now. I guess I shall simply have to be careful. Oh by the way, the en dash and em dash do not appear directly on the keyboard. You can activate them using the Alt key. You have to hold Alt, type in a number, and release Alt. The relevant character will appear. The numbers only work on the numeric keypad for me. 

Alt 0150 = en–dash

Alt 0151 = em—dash