You may have landed here because I had just apologized for my obsessiveness over punctuation in a GitHub comment and requested changes to your pull request, or you noticed me adding periods to a sentence in the otherwise excellent document you have authored. This is not the first time, and my condition manifests itself in some interesting ways.
Consider the following, seemingly well-formed sentence.
This is what I actually see.
This must be, obviously, a you problem! How can you fix it? Add a period to this complete sentence.
Quite seriously, the gist of the issue is that I am simply not capable of reading text that is not properly punctuated. It’s not you, it’s me. Please add a period.
My rule of thumb for dealing with this condition is that a complete sentence should end with a period. Don’t add a period to “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” or “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog”.
Consistently punctuate list items, such as either all items are full, capitalized sentences, or none of them are. The following are good examples.
1. One quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
2. Two quick brown foxes jump over the lazy dog.
- one quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
- two quick brown foxes jump over the lazy dog
After a very deep breath I may be able to tolerate a period at the end of a list, as long as the items are capitalized consistently, but this is not recommended. Periods are cheap.
1. One quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
2. Two quick brown foxes jump over the lazy dog
3. Three quick brown foxes jump over the lazy dog.
There’s “attention to detail” and there’s “obsessing over periods”. I am sorry for my obsession, but I do appreciate your attention to detail.
While you are here, you should also know that I am a compulsive sorter. For example, I organize my personal documents and photos by year, going back to 1990. Each year has a subfolder for each of the months.
There’s more.
In 2016 I had to invent a structure for my local git clones after having an episode. I have hundreds of labels to sort through GitHub notifications.
The posts in this blog are similarly organized, and the fact that there’s both a _posts and a posts folder in Jekyll is currently very triggering. I am thrown off by lines wrapping in markdown, and I wrote a Danger plugin to ensure consistent sentence formatting in a project’s CHANGELOG.md.
This condition spills into real life, as I obsessively classify the smallest of my expenses into dozens of custom categories in the personal finance app Monarch, including “Electric Scooter”, “Kids Lunch” and “Kitchen Utensils”.
While writing this post, I also realized that I am not as triggered by lack of order or punctuation in books. I quite enjoy the chaos of William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch”. I wonder what it is about computers that causes this in me?