Distracting mannerisms? I've got 'em aplenty. Influenza is 'flu, for instance, and 'tis similar for other words with leading apostrophes. Ligatures like those in æsthetic, Cæsar, and encyclopædia tend to obtrude. So do inflected letters as in rôle, naïveté, etc.

Then there's the overuse of interjections, alas, as well as parenthetical asides (really?!). Don't forget the folksy dialect schtick — aw, shucks, Ma'am, wouldn't wanna sound too lit'ry here, ya know? It contrasts with ponderous polysyllabic prose, wherever possible involving heavy alliteration and foreign phrases ad nauseam. Sprinkle liberally with metaphors, allude to something that by any other name would smell as sweet, and try to steal home when the reader isn't looking.

Have I mentioned self-referential whimsy yet?

And when there's nothing more to say I have a propensity to end with a dangling ellipsis, often combined with a cliché from an old TV show. Sorry about that ...

TopicHumor - TopicWriting - 2003-01-19

The son of the august ^z is far from exempt from silly habits. One I've noticed is my penchant for periodic pauses; scads of semicolons are scattered throughout my sentences, not to mention commas. RadRob

(correlates: Comments on Suboptimism, NothingHappens, NoGlory, ...)