did you even notice?

There are things I do on this blog that often matter only to me. For example, I've explained why I defy convention when it comes to how I use ellipses or how I used to use em dashes (back when I wrote em dashes as a double hyphen, i.e., before figuring out em dashes on both Mac and PC). Ellipses are normally supposed to be three or four periods* with spaces in front and behind each of them:

She gave Brent a smile . . . then pulled the trigger.

What I normally do is:

She gave Brent a smile... then pulled the trigger.

This is to avoid the weird, "non-breaking" property that ellipses possess on certain platforms like Blogger. If I didn't put a space after the ellipsis in my version of the sentence, the phrase smile...then would be treated as a single, long word, and at the end of a line, if that "word" was too long, the whole thing would spill over to the next line instead of just the word then. That's why I put the space after the ellipsis. I also write my ellipses the way I do (... , not . . . ) because the "space between every period" convention isn't universally agreed upon. In fact, some word processors, when you type out three periods, will automatically group those three periods together tightly into a single ellipsis "character." Try it out sometime on your word processor: type an ellipsis, then see how many times you have to hit the delete key to erase it. If it's just once, the ellipsis has been changed into a single character. If it's three or four times, then your word processor is a libertarian when it comes to punctuation.

Back when I used to make my em dashes with two hyphens (--), I would put a space after the two hyphens for the same reason: Blogger is weird that way. Now, of course, and for many years, I know how to make proper em dashes (—, for dramatic pauses, etc.), and I no longer insert spaces anywhere. On a Mac, it's a simultaneous keystroke combination: shift-option-hyphen. On a Windows PC, you hold down the alt key and type 0151.

my old way: Frances gripped the heavy barbell-- with her crotch. 
my "new" way (for years now): Frances gripped the heavy barbell—with her crotch.

So with ellipses (normally . . . ), I have my quirky, maybe-acceptable way of handling them. And for em dashes (—), I changed how I handle them. 

For the longest time, I've also had my own convention for handling movie titles: I surround them with quotation marks. Many news and magazine articles also reflect this convention (see here; I'm not hallucinating this). Technically, the title of any completed creative work should be italicized. Movies, once they're released, are completed creative works. A book of poetry, once published, has a title (Leaves of Grass), but each poem in that collection is cited with quotation marks around the poem's title (a work within a work, like "Song of Myself"). The same would be true for a compendium of short stories, like Stephen King's Four Past Midnight (the collection title) and "The Langoliers" (a story within that collection).

Starting with my recent review of The Last Samurai, I finally decided to bow to proper convention and italicize movie titles. Did you notice? Look at my reviews for The Fall Guy and Nosferatu. The major reason for this is the movie-review book I've been working on: Part of my editing involves stripping away the quotation marks and italicizing all the titles I find. It's a pain in the ass. So as an investment in the future, I'm bowing to convention and italicizing movie titles from now on.

I lose something, though, when I do this: I lose the ability to distinguish between a book title and a movie title, as when I wrote this sentence in my Nosferatu review:

One theme of the movie is about how science fails in the face of pure evil, a theme also touched on in both the novel The Exorcist and the movie "The Exorcist."

With everything now italicized, that distinction will be lost, which is a bit sad. On the other hand, I'll have one less distinction to worry about for future reviews.

But sad or not, I'm now sticking with italics for all titles of completed creative works. Come to think of it, I watched the English-dubbed version of Princess Mononoke again over the weekend—a film I hadn't watched in years. So a review for that will be coming down the pipe this week. Another chance for you to notice my newly italicized movie titles.

__________

*Use three periods for sentence fragments and four periods for complete sentences.