You can't type 4 words without making a grammar mistake?
What if we talk about style? A Questioning sentence constructed solely by taking a declarative one and altering punctuation is an abomination to sight and mind.
There's only one grammatical rule I usually let slide. I'll allow a quotation mark to be within the general punctuation of the sentence if the item being quoted is a code snippet, variable name, username, or password.
E.g.:
Your password is "foobar".
While ugly and incorrect, it prevents parsing errors that I have seen with my own eyes involving people unable to log in due to adding periods to their passwords.
I usually leave punctuation off the end of a sentence that ends with a URL for that reason. I guess that's obvious. I tend not to surround URLs in quotation marks because of the propensity of my users to include the quotation marks when trying to navigate there.
i am morally opposed to capitalization, unless formatted in gothic script. whenever i DO use it, it serves some purpose other than going after a punctuation mark.
While ugly and incorrect, it prevents parsing errors that I have seen with my own eyes involving people unable to log in due to adding periods to their passwords.
Ugly I grant you, but only incorrect in American English. The rule in British English is "Place the comma and period inside the quotation marks if they are part of the quoted material, otherwise place them outside."
Why would you ever put a URL, bare, anywhere in a sentence? There's anchor tags for those things. On traditional media all you have to do is make a mark and put the URL at the bottom of the page. Kind of impossible to fuck that up I think.
Ugly I grant you, but only incorrect in American English. The rule in British English is "Place the comma and period inside the quotation marks if they are part of the quoted material, otherwise place them outside."
British English. It allows me to be dumber about English grammar rules.
Allow me to hijack this conversation on grammar to vent my frustration at the serial comma, and how my two writing gigs have opposing views on whether it should be used or not.
i am morally opposed to capitalization, unless formatted in gothic script. whenever i DO use it, it serves some purpose other than going after a punctuation mark.
The serial comma should be used. Failing to use it is just laziness. I successfully lobbied my publisher to adopt a house style that overrides the Associated Press prejudice against it.
The serial comma should be used. Failing to use it is just laziness. I successfully lobbied my publisher to adopt a house style that overrides the Associated Press prejudice against it.
I got a letter grade dropped from my Journalism Writing class because I insisted on using the serial comma instead of the stupid AP style. I feel vindicated.
I would wear that grade drop as a badge of honor. I would have bolded each of them in my papers. I would have commissioned a wooden comma and presented it to my professor.
The serial comma should be used. Failing to use it is just laziness. I successfully lobbied my publisher to adopt a house style that overrides the Associated Press prejudice against it.
I got a letter grade dropped from my Journalism Writing class because I insisted on using the serial comma instead of the stupid AP style. I feel vindicated.
Interestingly, I've been told this is a holdover from the days of hand-typesetting on the old printing presses - it's a space-saving measure, since the comma would take up a space during typesetting, and saving the space used by the Oxford comma was deemed more important than the additional clarity offered.
This could, of course, be absolute bullshit, but I'll be honest, it does make sense, considering that it's not just the AP guide, but most Media stylebooks and guidebooks, including the one used by the Times(London, not New York.)
Ours - The Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers - is oddly flexible in that regard, in that it doesn't strictly say not to use it, but merely advises against it except in cases where it's needed to reduce ambiguity.
I've lost count how many times I've argued with my graphic designer wife over using the Oxford comma. Basically, I'm in favor of using it and she's against using it. Then again, given her typesetting background, maybe the typesetting excuse Churba mentions is her reason.
That's actually the reason, but the problem is that modern papers don't have the space restrictions that old ones did. We don't full-justify columns anymore (for the most part) and InDesign or Quark can kern the shit out of lines to accommodate our needs. Plus, writers don't obsessively select shorter words and phrasing, so why be obsessively conservative with a single-digit punctuation?
Also, the most common objection I hear from writers about the serial comma is that "you don't have to waste energy on it." That makes it about being lazy -- and if you're so lazy as to avoid a keystroke, then I don't have space for you on staff.
Comments
E.g.:
Your password is "foobar".
While ugly and incorrect, it prevents parsing errors that I have seen with my own eyes involving people unable to log in due to adding periods to their passwords.
This could, of course, be absolute bullshit, but I'll be honest, it does make sense, considering that it's not just the AP guide, but most Media stylebooks and guidebooks, including the one used by the Times(London, not New York.)
Ours - The Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers - is oddly flexible in that regard, in that it doesn't strictly say not to use it, but merely advises against it except in cases where it's needed to reduce ambiguity.
Also, the most common objection I hear from writers about the serial comma is that "you don't have to waste energy on it." That makes it about being lazy -- and if you're so lazy as to avoid a keystroke, then I don't have space for you on staff.
EDIT: Oxford comma, FTW!