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.

  • magnetosphere @beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m not completely confident, either, but I was thinking the same thing. It’s not okay to start a sentence with “which”, but if the period between sentences was a comma instead, it would be perfectly fine.

    • Zagaroth@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      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.