The syllabic characters are conventionally presented in a chart (see above) with characters organized into rows representing the value of the syllable onset and the columns representing vowel quality. A glottal stop or preceding a vowel is optionally written with a separate character , as in ᐱᒪᑕᐦᐁ pimaatahe 'is skating'. The syllable-closing characters referred to as finals (called "terminations" by Evans, with "final" being a later terminological innovation), occur in both word-final, and, less frequently, word-internal positions. The finals are generally superscripted, but originally were printed or handwritten mid-line. There are two distinct sets of finals in use, a Western set and an Eastern set. The Western finals are accent-like in appearance and are unrelated to the other characters. The Eastern finals occur in four different forms. The more common form, the a-position finals, uses smaller versions of the characters for syllables containing the vowel ; the less common i-position sets use either smaller versions of the characters for syllables containing the vowel or their full height forms. Use of the i-position series is common in some communities particularly in handwriting.Fiero, Charles, 1985, p. 96 The least common are those who use a mixture of a-position, i-position, and o-position series in their smaller version as finals, dependent on the word root. The Western finals were introduced in the earliest version of the syllabary and the Eastern finals were introduced in the 1860s. The examples in the table are cited from Neskantaga, Ontario (Lansdowne House), a community assigned to the Northwestern Ojibwe dialect. The sound is represented by adding a diacritic , sometimes called the w-dot', to a triangle or consonant-vowel character. Several different patterns of use occur related to the use of western or eastern finals: (a) Western, w-dot added after the character it modifies, with western finals; (b) Eastern, w-dot added before the character it modifies, with eastern finals; (c) Northern, w-dot added before the character it modifies, with western finals. Vowel length is phonologically contrastive in Ojibwe but is frequently not indicated by syllabics writers; for example, the words aakim 'snowshoe' and akim 'count him, them!' may both be written ᐊᑭᑦ. Vowel length is optionally indicated by placing a dot above the character, with the exception of , for which there is no corresponding short vowel and, therefore, no need to indicate length. The practice of indicating vowel length is called 'pointed syllabics' or 'pointing'. In the pointed