Hallo Besucher, der Thread wurde 4,3k mal aufgerufen und enthält 4 Antworten

letzter Beitrag von TheRyk am

writing style

    as i've written a bunch of articles, i am always have some problems with the general writing style.


    how is it with uppercase/lowercase letters? i tend to write everything small, except the beginning of the sentence, specific names (Commodore) or shortcuts (CPU, NOP, FLI). by mistake i've also written a "raster time" article instead of "Raster time" and i am not able to change this as far as i've seen. just asking this b/c i guess it's good to have some kind of conformity inside the wiki.


    on a sidenote i must say that i try not to translate the german articles, i gather informations from different sources and write up my own, trying to write it so that a total beginner maybe also can use the given information. as in the raster time article, it's also hard to stay in the topic, because you cannot define it without explaining the vic chip inner workings a bit. (i added the article b/c i often read of "raster time" but no real definition could be found anywhere)

    As the C64 wiki should have a certain standard you should try and keep to the writing rules of the English language e.g. I should always be written with a capital letter, same with the names of months (but you know - nobody is perfect ;))


    If I remember correctly we decided that article names should always start with a capital letter - it is like a headline or a chapter in a book, also in the English language this is written with a capital letter in the first word. Depending on what follows the words after that are written with capital letters (names) or not (other things, sorry there is no example coming to my mind now).


    It is a good thing gathering the information yourselves in the English articles, it is not necessary to translate all the German articles word by word. Just try to make sure that information which has already been gathered in the corresponding German article does not get lost in the English article.


    For my part I mostly translate game articles and don't have that much time for gathering information myself (and also I don't have much talent in writing my own texts :rotwerd: ).

    Well, concerning capitalized letters, here are the most important rules that come to mind:
    - at the beginning of sentences
    - 1st person singular "I"
    - at the beginning of names (<-- of places, persons, brand names, games, companies etc.)
    - nationalities (England, English, Englishman)
    - in headlines: usually you capitalize the first word and anything else except for articles, prepositions and maybe conjunctions or possessive pronouns, examples: "Seven Cities of Gold" / "Law of the West" / "The Way of the Exploding Fist" / "Mr. Robot and His Robot Factory"


    In the discussion of the article "BASIC" I summarized another simple rule for improving your English very briefly (English syntax/word order):
    klick
    I do not claim that my English is always perfect. I am no native speaker, but I studied English for several years and graduated last summer. I do not tell you this to show off, but to give you an idea how to judge the quality of my tips.


    The quality of many existing articles is at least disputable. Whenever I come across "Denglish", I try to correct it. Then again, I do not wish to disencourage anybody to write for the English Wiki because he is unsure whether his English is sufficient. I guess we will have to wait until more native speakers turn up before we really achieve a good standard. Nonetheless, I would appreciate when every non-native speaker at least tries his very best to improve his English. The aforesaid tips are really short and you're never too old to learn.

    Well, that might be true.


    But for a foreign (non-German) reader at least any English article (including my own ones - which may be a little difficult for the average reader - as well as D-English ones) is easier to understand than the German versions. And in countries without any TV translation such as those of Scandinavia even the average people are a great deal better at English than here in Germany.


    But I agree: communication is always much more important than accuracy. And that's what I meant in the last paragraph of my last post: (almost) any article is useful, so let's all keep writing - no matter if one's English is good or not so good. Only by doing so we finally will get more international attention and might be joined by more native speakers who help to correct our mistakes.