Editing City Series:Volume5a Chapter3 (section)

===Beretta’s Letter: To Rosetta===

To my beloved friend…or whatever,

Yahoo. Your letter arrived and there was nothing wrong with it. It was quite good.

Now, listen. Letters are used to convey and confirm the things that you and the recipient need to know. Your letter fulfilled that role just fine. It was far better than the unbelievably crude ones from my friend whose promiscuity might as well be a national treasure…actually that isn’t giving you enough credit. Yours was legitimately good and not just good compared to hers, so don’t worry.

I will not throw out your letter and I will not forget about it.

I was worried you might find me to be something of an annoyance. I can be pretty cowardly.

Are you looking out at the city? Are you going out in the yard and walking around?

Foxes and wild rabbits live in Boulogne Forest, so you might see some on the mansion hill. I spotted a fox hole on the slope when I was there. So if you do see something that isn’t human in the yard, use an Ajouter to look at it. It is probably the same as you, so if you don’t do anything to displease it, it should happily leave.

Don’t forget that there are always a lot of beings other than you around you.

Um, I keep getting really preachy with you, don’t I? I think I’m turning into an old lady now that I’m past 20. Ugh. But now that I have the old man’s permission, I’ll stop by to play with you from time to time. There’s a lot you need to know.

There really is a lot I want to tell you, so I think I’ll be by before long.

We live in dangerous times and I could get arrested any day, but let’s try to enjoy this.



P.S.

I do have some advice about letter writing. Or about writing in general, really.

There are rules you need to follow when writing. Your letter doesn’t follow them and…um…simply put, it’s a pretty major flaw.

I don’t want to dump a bunch of complicated stuff on you at once, so I’ll teach you bit by bit. When I write, there’s always a “.” at the end. ←This

First of all, I want you think about what that means.

Have you thought about it? Now for an example. In your letter, you quoted me like this:

“You do not seem to cry at times like this but I will remind you of this You have the right and duty to remember it Old man you know what I mean right”

Try reading that out loud. Could you read it all in one breath?

You couldn’t, could you? Do you know why not? Because when I said it, I didn’t say it all in one breath. So the way you have written it makes it hard to tell where you are supposed to pause for a breath.

To make it easier to read, you would have to use a Signe to copy down exactly what I said, including the breaths.

But writing down “breath” each time would be lame, right? So we use a symbol to indicate a breath. I’ll write it out using that rule.

“You do not seem to cry at times like this but I will remind you of that. You have the right and duty to remember it. Old man you know what I mean right.”

That “.” tells you when to take a breath. Now read it out loud while putting in the breaths.

Do you get it now? Even when we read silently, we still take breaths in our head. When you speak with the old man, you aren’t just speaking continuously, right? You make sure to pause to breathe and to think, don’t you?

Think about it. If you do, I think you should know where to put the “.”.

The general rule is to put a “.” where you need to take a breath. ←Like this

Wow, this P.S. has gotten long. Bye for now. I want to speak with you soon and there might be things you can teach me.

Oh, and you also wrote this in your letter:

<nowiki><I want to ask her that and I also cannot help but think about when she seems to be lost in thought</nowiki>

If there is something she wants to say I wish she would say it>

Thanks. Yeah, that’s all.