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aoisakana - blog owner
Saturday, June 10, 2006
--- Action vs. Speaking ---
   In roleplay, whether it is conducted through a chatroom, email, or any other number of roleplay mediums there will most usually, action/description and speech in each post. This means that part of your post will be descriptive, detailing what your character looks like, their thoughts, or their surroundings, etc. And the other part of your post would consist of your character speaking.

   What needs to happen then is a way for people to distinguish what part of the post is action/descriptive and what part of the post is the character's speech. An example of that would be:

::Avemano bursted through the rear entrance to the restaurant, having not seen her 'family' in a long time. She was excited to see them, to tell them what she has seen on her travels and, of course, to eat that delicious home cooked-style meal the restaurant was prized for.:: Mama! Guoguo! I'm home! ::She called out, regardless of whether there were customers in the restaurant or not. Most of the regulars were used to that sort of racket anyway.::

   The use of double colons (::) brackted the description, clearly segregated that post into their descriptive and speech parts. To be able to make the distinction between the spoken and descriptive parts of a post is incredibly important because it reduces the ambiguity of what a person is doing, saying or thinking. A post such as this:

::Avemano wrinkled her nose at the man who clearly hadn't had a shower in at least a week. She then turned to the woman.:: She thought he was some crazy guy or something.

   Now, in this post, we know that Avemano is saying "She thought he was some crazy guy or something" to the woman. But if the post was written as such:

Avemano wrinkled her nose at the man who clearly hadn't had a shower in at least a week. She then turned to the woman. She thought he was some crazy guy or something.

   In that same post, without the double colons, we are unsure whether she is speaking to the woman, or it was just a thought Avemano had. So you can understand and see how important it is to have those sort of distinctions.

   There are many, many ways to make this distinction. Typically, for my characters, what I put in the double colons would be action unless surrounded by quotation marks (") which would signify thought. And speach would be outside the double colons. Here is a list of a few symbols that are often used:

::
'
" - for speech, usually
*
~
||
[ - ]
{ - }
//
\=
`

   Note: the common brackets [ ( - ) ] are not often used because when used as doubles [ (( - )) ] it signifies that the player is speaking OOC
 aoisakana 10:55