So I was not able to get in all of various characters I use when I write. I use a lot of them, particularly when I am writing in an “experimental” format. (Different font colors, font sizes and and punctuation being used in novel ways to communication what’s going on in the story.) Most of my experimental formatting has been with my fanfic but I’ve also used in a more limited extent with my original fic. So! Here are the special characters doing things they were possibly not intended to do.
- [,]: Square brackets are most often used for [Translation of Concept]. For those cases where your character is talking to an eldritch horror that is trying very hard not to explode their brain. Or where the translation device is just not cutting it.
- <,>: Angle brackets. I used to use them to convey <Telepathy>. I do not do this anymore because angle brackets are for HTML tags. (Yes, I know there is a code for making angle brackets that will not be read as HTML, but I can NEVER REMEMBER THEM. They are just another thing my neurospicy brain will not retain. And I keep thinking I should write it down but I never do, and I’d probably keep losing whatever I wrote it down on.)
- (,): Parenthesis! This generally gets used when I want to enclose asides or different thoughts into the paragraph. Or when there is extra information that gets inserted between actions within whatever I’m writing. (Why do I feel the need for parenthetical asides? I don’t know!)
- *: Asterisk. This has been used to convey italics when writing by hand. It has been used to convey telepathy. It has been used to mark off where actions are being described (such as when roleplaying, or just goofing off and describing actions in third person while chatting/texting with someone.
- ~: I think this wiggly thing is called a tilde. Only very rarely used, and I’ve used it the way I’ve seen others use it, as a kind of marker of “Speaking in a mocking sing song voice like a huge tool~!
- _: Understrike Technically understrike is supposed to be used to indicate italics. (Such as for book titles or the names of ships or something.) I generally use it to separate out the titles of reviews and essays.
- –: Em dash, my beloved. This is something like a semi colon? (I know they have a specific use but I tend to think of them in term of “length of pause.” A comma is a short pause, a semi colon is a longer pause, with something linked to it, and the em dash is a longer pause with something plopped in the middle, and then the sentence usually continues on the other end.
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