submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Zagaroth@beehaw.org to c/writing@beehaw.org

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So, Grammarly is correcting me a lot on a phrase I tend to use, and I don't entirely understand the difference.

On a sentence that expands upon a previous sentence in dialog, I tend to have a character say "Which means [...]"

Grammarly wants to fix this to be "This means [...]"

It's become clear to me that I tend to use 'which' instead of 'this' when speaking, but I am not sure why one is preferred use over the other.

Can anyone offer me some insight? I already tried googling "which vs this", but I got results for "which vs that" instead, which is an entirely different use case.

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[-] Zagaroth@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

So this sounds like it's one of those arbitrary technicalities that isn't a big deal, in a single flow of dialog at least. When a character is speaking, the difference between a period and a comma is a convention of the written medium, in the spoken word it's not such a clear delineation.

Now, if another character was responding to what the first character said, "this" over "which" seems like it might be more important.

this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023

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