8 ms·

The Punctuation Guide

104 points by DavidSJ 9y ago

IshKebab 9y ago
Actually pretty good but it still falls into the trap of thinking that there are rules, and that some people follow them and some people break them. For example: > When used in this way, the bracketed information should be an addition, not a substitution. For example, if the original quotation is “She never called back,” do not change it to “[Lucy] never called back.” Instead write: “She [Lucy] never called back.” (Note: Many newspapers ignore this rule. In professional and academic writing, it is better to follow it.) Says who? About the only real "rule" I can think of in English is that you use "an" iff the following word starts with a vowel sound. But even some people (idiots) break that rule for the weirdly specific case of 'historic'.
- ggus 9y ago
  I agree: there are no rules in a language. The baseline is to try to produce something that can be understood by your public, so try to stick to whatever convention they are used to, or come up with new ways that they can make a sense of. But I won't even call that a "rule".
  - mh-cx 9y ago
    > I agree: there are no rules in a language. Really? Isn't that a bit broad? It may be half true for some languages but definitely not for all. For example in Germany we have the "Der Duden" which is not only a dictionary that defines the correct spelling of words but also contains a huge set of grammatical rules. It's still the de-facto standard for correct language in German. And even in english you'd probably agree that there are some rules, e.g. when it comes to the correct spelling of words.
    - pluma 9y ago
      The Duden doesn't define correct spelling, it merely documents it. It's decidedly not a prescriptive work. What you're likely thinking of is the German orthography rules defined by the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung and in turn strongly influenced by actual practice rather than just dogma -- the most recent revisions are very forgiving with regard to acceptable variations. Linguists on the other hand have given up on prescriptivism decades ago. Scientific linguistics are entirely descriptivist, studying how language is used rather than prescribing how it ought to be used.
      - bmn__ 9y ago
        One particularly nasty hold-out of minority prescriptivists among those lexicographers was the renouncement of capital sharp s. It took about a good century to force them to not deny reality anymore.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    The goal of communication is to accurately exchange information. Doing so accurately requires both parties adhering to rules they have previously agreed on. If you don't want to accurately exchange information, that is a choice you can make. However, it should come as no surprise when you find people ignoring your attempt to contribute. I don't think it needs to be exact, but an effort to express things accurately should be made. If I say, "Fish garbanzo bean flunky jellybean!" It is quite reasonable for you to say, "No, that isn't the name of an ocean." If I continue doing so, then I would expect to be excluded from the conversation.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  Sociologically it's perhaps interesting. One might want to "follow the rules" in order to minimize friction with an intended audience. Also, I'm sure we've all encountered cases where punctuation changes how we interpret a sentence. Then there's the more artistic concern of stylistic consistency. These punctuation "rules" might be better seen as some sort of a protocol standard. I'm pretty sure there are, in fact, several competing standards. Following whatever standard is clearly a choice, but that choice does something for setting up reader expectations.
- dghf 9y ago
  There may not be rules, but as in language as a whole, there are commonly shared and accepted conventions that can aid comprehensibility -- but only to the extent that they are commonly shared and accepted. I've known some people who insist that punctuation is irrelevant, and they can understand written text perfectly well without it. And their reading speed does seem to be unaffected by the presence or absence of punctuation. But I generally find that while my reading speed is about the same as theirs for unpunctuated text, I read punctuated text faster than they do. Conventional punctuation helps those acquainted with the conventions to parse text. As they are just conventions, they will inevitably change over time. For example, it seems to be increasingly common to link two main clauses with a comma. Outside certain rhetorical and poetical usages, I find this jarring. But I may already be in a minority, and at some point in the not too distant future, it may not merit comment at all, except in the rantings of rules-fixated, traditionalist grammarians and would-be grammarians.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    Honestly I'm on board with joining all coordinate and subordinate clauses with punctuation all the time and calling it a day. In any other context, such apparently random deviations to the rules would not be celebrated. (Apparently random, because any actual reason is historic, likely unknown, and potentially not even relevant to modern writers.)
- tpeo 9y ago
  Imagine that we want to travel between two points in a rugged landscape. By the very nature of the problem, we have infinitely many ways to do this. However, once we start imposing certain constraints e.g. that we should always prefer the path that requires the lesser amount of energy, our set of possible solutions narrows down pretty fast. I know particularly aggressive pedants made linguistic rules unfashionable, but most of the time they are merely suggestions of how to get the most of language e. g. how to avoid ambiguities and get your meaning across. Sure, they aren't rules in the sense of constraining every single possible manifestation of language. But no one ever thought that. Not even the pedants: instead they believed that they should constrain every possible manifestation, which implies that they believed they don't.
- yorwba 9y ago
  I can't tell whom you're calling an idiot here: people who pronounce historic with an initial vowel or those who don't?
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    People who say "an historic", with a hard 'h'. It is because people used to say "an 'istoric", which is correct. The reason "an" exists is because it is quite hard to say things like "a elephant". Much easier to say "an elephant". Similarly it's quite hard to say "a 'istoric occasion" - much easier to say "an 'istoric occasion". However since we now say "historic", not "'istoric", it is much easier to say "a historic occasion" than "an historic occasion". For some reason this (and only this) combination has been repeated enough that people over-correct and think that there must be some rule that they never learnt that dictates that it is "an historic". They don't really consider why "an" exists. Nobody ever says "Tomorrow I have an history lesson." Anyway, that's about the only 'rule' I can think of that doesn't really have any exceptions.
- blackkettle 9y ago
  The 'an' rule for 'historic' is related to historical pronunciation trends. Particularly in Britain, but even in the US if you go back a bit further, it used to be common in certain dialects to not pronounce the 'h'. The choice of 'a' vs 'an' reflected that trend: http://www.betterwritingskills.com/tip-w005.html http://www.betterwritingskills.com/tip-w005.html
- osteele 9y ago
  > Actually pretty good but it still falls into the trap of thinking that there are rules, and that some people follow them and some people break them. I recommend _The Linguistics of Punctuation_, by Geoffrey Nunberg. It's a linguistically-informed descriptive (rather than prescriptive) analysis of English punctuation.
- osteele 9y ago
  > But even some people (idiots) break that rule for the weirdly specific case of 'historic'. Perhaps P is confused about the distinctions between "dialect", "idiolect", and "idiot". Or perhaps "idiot" means "dialect", in P's idiolect.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  >Says who? That would be you, apparently, calling people idiots for breaking what you call the only real rule you can think of. Note that this is called a guide. Some of the rules are just convention, but many make the writing easier to follow, and some can help avoid ambiguity. Even in the cases where it is merely a matter of convention, significant variance might be creative, but it is more likely to be taken as a signal that you haven't read much (allowance should be made for those for whom the language in question is not their native tongue.) I dipped into this guide, and it seemed to be written in a very straightforward manner - take a look at the section on the differences between British and American punctuation, for example.
- jameshart 9y ago
  Why do you think the a/an rule is legitimate, but that, say, verb-subject agreement isn't? Both are pretty much universally followed, but can be broken for particular effect. If you allow a/an to be called a rule, I think you have to also say 'I am/you are' is a rule, too. A/an creates though my favorite technical copyediting conundrum, which is that of which version of the article to use for the subject "SQL query". Some readers will vocalize this as 'sequel query', others as 'ess-queue-ell query'. If you write 'an SQL query' you will seem illiterate to half your readers, while 'a SQL query' is just as jarring for the other half.
nickcw 9y ago
I enjoyed the rules about the em dash — It reminded me of the English class that I was taught that you could use it in place of pretty much every bit of punctuation and the subsequent essays I wrote having optimized the rules of English punctuation somewhat ;-)
ranko 9y ago
This is quite specific to US English, for example "Top Ten Tips" number 2 about quotation marks. As Robert Bringhurst says in The Elements of Typographic Style: Most North American editors like their commas and periods inside the raised commas, "like this;" but their colons and semicolons outside. Many British editors prefer to put all punctuation outside, with the milk and the cat.
- teddyh 9y ago
  http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html > Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.
  - hhjkjhkjhhlkj 9y ago
    I find the changing stuff that is a quotation at odds with the whole point of quoting something. I'm from the UK so the guide is actually unhelpful for me as it introduces what I'd see as bad practices. Also an ellipses is a special character not 3 full stops, even if they are a good substitute.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    I guess that makes me a 'hacker'. I can see why we the old way might look nicer, but the hacker way is simply more precise.
  - hanbura 9y ago
    Arguments for British style quotes: - doesn't mutate the quoted string - fewer weird edge cases - encodes more information in same amount of characters (if quote might have ended on punctuation) - needs fewer rules Arguments for American style quotes - It looks more balanced if punctuation marks that use less ink than a quotation mark come before it I think there is no surprise that hackers prefer the straight-forward way that might look marginally worse
zuzun 9y ago
If you're looking for a free resource, I found the Style Manual by the U.S. Government Printing Office a helpful reference on how to write and typeset things in English. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2008/content-detail.html https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2008/content-d...
rocqua 9y ago
What about period placement and display-style math (as opposed to inline math). Take the following example. From FOO we can conclude that: CAT = FOOBAR Does one place a period inside that display math? It has nothing to do with the equation, but it seems like the only reasonable place for it.
- benji-york 9y ago
  In that case, I elide the terminal.
Stratoscope 9y ago
Much of the advice here is good, but some is a bit weird. > I will give the document to my brother, Tom. (The writer has only one brother. The brother's name is nonessential and therefore set off with a comma.) > I will give the document to my brother Tom. (The writer has more than one brother. In this case, the specific brother—Tom—is essential information and should not be set off with a comma.) I know this used to be considered an important distinction, but I think few writers would worry about it today. Does the reader care if Tom is the writer's only brother? Either way the writer is talking only about Tom, not any possible other brothers. I think many writers today would leave out the comma in either case. Take an example where it's clear there is only one: I am going to visit my mother Helen. I am going to visit my mother, Helen. I don't think leaving out the comma implies that I have more than one mother, and I doubt if anyone cares much about the comma here either. The trend today is to simply leave out commas where the meaning is clear. This example of the Oxford comma is really confusing: > I am taking art history, Russian literature, microeconomics, and macroeconomics next semester. It's a valid point that omitting the Oxford comma could make it sound like "microeconomics and macroeconomics" is a single course, but using the comma makes it sound like the first three courses are being taken this semester and macroeconomics next semester. It should be rewritten: > Next semester I am taking art history, Russian literature, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. There is a similar situation where the Oxford comma is needed in the programming joke: There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. It ruins the joke (to my eyes) if you leave it out: There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. And enough with the commas already in a sentence like this: > Your work has been, frankly, awful. Ugh. Does anyone actually write that instead of: Your work has been frankly awful. (Of course I would never say that to someone but would find a more constructive way to put it.) My advice: Write simply and clearly. Know these purported rules but take them with a healthy grain of salt. Omit unnecessary punctuation where the meaning is clear to the reader. And if you need extra punctuation to avoid confusion, consider rewriting the sentence for clarity.
- rocqua 9y ago
  Regarding the final example, I disagree. "Your work has been frankly awful" has frankly as an adverb. That is, it was awful in a frank way. "Your work has been, frankly, awful" makes it clear that frankly is a parenthetical remark that isn't part of the sentence. With commas 'frankly' modifies how the writer intends the sentence to be received. Without, it modifies how awful the writer things your work has been. I suppose in some situations, the absurdity of 'being awful in a frank way' is sufficient to resolve the ambiguity.
happy-go-lucky 9y ago
As an aspiring technical writer, these were my go-to references. https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ https://brians.wsu.edu/common-errors/ https://brians.wsu.edu/common-errors/ http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html
mysterypie 9y ago
Talking about punctuation abuse, people that litter their emails or texts with ellipses is something I can't figure out: "Hey! I haven't heard from you in a while... I'm still in Boston... Can't complain cause it's been good... I saw the circus before it closed..." What do they think they're saying with all those crazy unneeded ellipses?
- oddlyaromatic 9y ago
  Lots of people do this to connect loosely related sentences because to them the "..." reads like a little pause. I guess it feels more comfortable, less formal, and let's them get the words out without worrying about structure too much.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Two otherwise very smart family members of mine both used to do this. It takes sitting down and explaining that email isn't a voicemail. We're not "hearing" the pause when we read, we're just confused and it makes the person writing seem dumber than they actually are.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  I believe it is due to an unwillingness to make a concrete statement. A full stop is strong and is equivalent to speech in a flat and confident tone. The ellipsis seems to stand in for short disclaimer phrases like "by the way", "in my opinion", "in case you were wondering", etc.
osteele 9y ago
Fun! I'd like to see this for other natural languages, and for programming languages.
SeanLuke 9y ago
http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-marks.html#adjacentpunctuation http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-marks.html#adja... > Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation. I firmly refuse to go along with this nonsense. http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html > The em dash is typically used without spaces on either side, and that is the style used in this guide. Most newspapers, however, set the em dash off with a single space on each side. Isn't this is US versus Britain, not "newspapers" versus "typical use"? And AFAIK it's not a "single space": it's ideally a half-space (in US style). The problem with no space is that your eyes can't easily disambiguate it from a hyphenated single word.
- Harvey-Specter 9y ago
  http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american-style.html http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american-s... > American style places commas and periods inside the quotation marks, even if they are not in the original material. British style (more sensibly) places unquoted periods and commas outside the quotation marks. Turns out that you (and I) prefer the British style.
- mlevental 9y ago
  >I firmly refuse to go along with this nonsense. here here.
  - insertnickname 9y ago
    Hear, hear
    - mlevental 9y ago
      thank you
- namelost 9y ago
  British is an en dash separated by spaces, American is an em dash with no spaces.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thomasfoster96 9y ago
> Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation. Please never do this. Commas and full stops have meaning. You’re modifying the original quote without telling the reader that you have done so. How this became the accepted practice in so many style guides and grammar checkers I will never understand. I shall defer to Geoffrey Pullum’s Punctuation and human freedom [0], whose title is entirely appropriate, for justification. Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style [1] can provide the unconvinced further justification. [0] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/punctfree.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/punctfree.pdf [1] https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799 https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/...
badcede 9y ago
Does case count as punctuation? 'I helped my uncle Jack off a horse.'
jwilk 9y ago
> Requests that are phrased as questions should end with a period. > Would you please send this report to the person indicated on the cover. Wait, really? IANA native speaker, but I don't think I've ever seen such requests without question mark.
- SerLava 9y ago
  Call me illiterate but that would be seen as either a mistake or as intentional rudeness. We structure instructions as requests for the sake of politeness, and using a period here would come across as a very subtle mockery of this. In context it would imply some level of disdain for the recipient's right to turn down the request.
gandutraveler 9y ago
Let Elaine do the explanation on exclamation mark : https://youtu.be/unz1CGoFVMU https://youtu.be/unz1CGoFVMU
Voodoo463 9y ago
Do you object greatly to the absence of the interrobang‽ I know I do.

104 points by DavidSJ 9y ago

Actually pretty good but it still falls into the trap of thinking that there are rules, and that some people follow them and some people break them. For example: > When used in this way, the bracketed information should be an addition, not a substitution. For example, if the original quotation is “She never called back,” do not change it to “[Lucy] never called back.” Instead write: “She [Lucy] never called back.” (Note: Many newspapers ignore this rule. In professional and academic writing, it is better to follow it.) Says who? About the only real "rule" I can think of in English is that you use "an" iff the following word starts with a vowel sound. But even some people (idiots) break that rule for the weirdly specific case of 'historic'.

ggus 9y ago
I agree: there are no rules in a language. The baseline is to try to produce something that can be understood by your public, so try to stick to whatever convention they are used to, or come up with new ways that they can make a sense of. But I won't even call that a "rule".
- mh-cx 9y ago
  > I agree: there are no rules in a language. Really? Isn't that a bit broad? It may be half true for some languages but definitely not for all. For example in Germany we have the "Der Duden" which is not only a dictionary that defines the correct spelling of words but also contains a huge set of grammatical rules. It's still the de-facto standard for correct language in German. And even in english you'd probably agree that there are some rules, e.g. when it comes to the correct spelling of words.
  - pluma 9y ago
    The Duden doesn't define correct spelling, it merely documents it. It's decidedly not a prescriptive work. What you're likely thinking of is the German orthography rules defined by the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung and in turn strongly influenced by actual practice rather than just dogma -- the most recent revisions are very forgiving with regard to acceptable variations. Linguists on the other hand have given up on prescriptivism decades ago. Scientific linguistics are entirely descriptivist, studying how language is used rather than prescribing how it ought to be used.
    - bmn__ 9y ago
      One particularly nasty hold-out of minority prescriptivists among those lexicographers was the renouncement of capital sharp s. It took about a good century to force them to not deny reality anymore.
- KGIII 9y ago
  The goal of communication is to accurately exchange information. Doing so accurately requires both parties adhering to rules they have previously agreed on. If you don't want to accurately exchange information, that is a choice you can make. However, it should come as no surprise when you find people ignoring your attempt to contribute. I don't think it needs to be exact, but an effort to express things accurately should be made. If I say, "Fish garbanzo bean flunky jellybean!" It is quite reasonable for you to say, "No, that isn't the name of an ocean." If I continue doing so, then I would expect to be excluded from the conversation.
xelxebar 9y ago
Sociologically it's perhaps interesting. One might want to "follow the rules" in order to minimize friction with an intended audience. Also, I'm sure we've all encountered cases where punctuation changes how we interpret a sentence. Then there's the more artistic concern of stylistic consistency. These punctuation "rules" might be better seen as some sort of a protocol standard. I'm pretty sure there are, in fact, several competing standards. Following whatever standard is clearly a choice, but that choice does something for setting up reader expectations.
dghf 9y ago
There may not be rules, but as in language as a whole, there are commonly shared and accepted conventions that can aid comprehensibility -- but only to the extent that they are commonly shared and accepted. I've known some people who insist that punctuation is irrelevant, and they can understand written text perfectly well without it. And their reading speed does seem to be unaffected by the presence or absence of punctuation. But I generally find that while my reading speed is about the same as theirs for unpunctuated text, I read punctuated text faster than they do. Conventional punctuation helps those acquainted with the conventions to parse text. As they are just conventions, they will inevitably change over time. For example, it seems to be increasingly common to link two main clauses with a comma. Outside certain rhetorical and poetical usages, I find this jarring. But I may already be in a minority, and at some point in the not too distant future, it may not merit comment at all, except in the rantings of rules-fixated, traditionalist grammarians and would-be grammarians.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  Honestly I'm on board with joining all coordinate and subordinate clauses with punctuation all the time and calling it a day. In any other context, such apparently random deviations to the rules would not be celebrated. (Apparently random, because any actual reason is historic, likely unknown, and potentially not even relevant to modern writers.)
tpeo 9y ago
Imagine that we want to travel between two points in a rugged landscape. By the very nature of the problem, we have infinitely many ways to do this. However, once we start imposing certain constraints e.g. that we should always prefer the path that requires the lesser amount of energy, our set of possible solutions narrows down pretty fast. I know particularly aggressive pedants made linguistic rules unfashionable, but most of the time they are merely suggestions of how to get the most of language e. g. how to avoid ambiguities and get your meaning across. Sure, they aren't rules in the sense of constraining every single possible manifestation of language. But no one ever thought that. Not even the pedants: instead they believed that they should constrain every possible manifestation, which implies that they believed they don't.
yorwba 9y ago
I can't tell whom you're calling an idiot here: people who pronounce historic with an initial vowel or those who don't?
- IshKebab 9y ago
  People who say "an historic", with a hard 'h'. It is because people used to say "an 'istoric", which is correct. The reason "an" exists is because it is quite hard to say things like "a elephant". Much easier to say "an elephant". Similarly it's quite hard to say "a 'istoric occasion" - much easier to say "an 'istoric occasion". However since we now say "historic", not "'istoric", it is much easier to say "a historic occasion" than "an historic occasion". For some reason this (and only this) combination has been repeated enough that people over-correct and think that there must be some rule that they never learnt that dictates that it is "an historic". They don't really consider why "an" exists. Nobody ever says "Tomorrow I have an history lesson." Anyway, that's about the only 'rule' I can think of that doesn't really have any exceptions.
blackkettle 9y ago
The 'an' rule for 'historic' is related to historical pronunciation trends. Particularly in Britain, but even in the US if you go back a bit further, it used to be common in certain dialects to not pronounce the 'h'. The choice of 'a' vs 'an' reflected that trend: http://www.betterwritingskills.com/tip-w005.html http://www.betterwritingskills.com/tip-w005.html
osteele 9y ago
> Actually pretty good but it still falls into the trap of thinking that there are rules, and that some people follow them and some people break them. I recommend _The Linguistics of Punctuation_, by Geoffrey Nunberg. It's a linguistically-informed descriptive (rather than prescriptive) analysis of English punctuation.
osteele 9y ago
> But even some people (idiots) break that rule for the weirdly specific case of 'historic'. Perhaps P is confused about the distinctions between "dialect", "idiolect", and "idiot". Or perhaps "idiot" means "dialect", in P's idiolect.
mannykannot 9y ago
>Says who? That would be you, apparently, calling people idiots for breaking what you call the only real rule you can think of. Note that this is called a guide. Some of the rules are just convention, but many make the writing easier to follow, and some can help avoid ambiguity. Even in the cases where it is merely a matter of convention, significant variance might be creative, but it is more likely to be taken as a signal that you haven't read much (allowance should be made for those for whom the language in question is not their native tongue.) I dipped into this guide, and it seemed to be written in a very straightforward manner - take a look at the section on the differences between British and American punctuation, for example.
jameshart 9y ago
Why do you think the a/an rule is legitimate, but that, say, verb-subject agreement isn't? Both are pretty much universally followed, but can be broken for particular effect. If you allow a/an to be called a rule, I think you have to also say 'I am/you are' is a rule, too. A/an creates though my favorite technical copyediting conundrum, which is that of which version of the article to use for the subject "SQL query". Some readers will vocalize this as 'sequel query', others as 'ess-queue-ell query'. If you write 'an SQL query' you will seem illiterate to half your readers, while 'a SQL query' is just as jarring for the other half.

nickcw 9y ago

I enjoyed the rules about the em dash — It reminded me of the English class that I was taught that you could use it in place of pretty much every bit of punctuation and the subsequent essays I wrote having optimized the rules of English punctuation somewhat ;-)

ranko 9y ago

This is quite specific to US English, for example "Top Ten Tips" number 2 about quotation marks. As Robert Bringhurst says in The Elements of Typographic Style: Most North American editors like their commas and periods inside the raised commas, "like this;" but their colons and semicolons outside. Many British editors prefer to put all punctuation outside, with the milk and the cat.

teddyh 9y ago
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html > Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.
- hhjkjhkjhhlkj 9y ago
  I find the changing stuff that is a quotation at odds with the whole point of quoting something. I'm from the UK so the guide is actually unhelpful for me as it introduces what I'd see as bad practices. Also an ellipses is a special character not 3 full stops, even if they are a good substitute.
- rocqua 9y ago
  I guess that makes me a 'hacker'. I can see why we the old way might look nicer, but the hacker way is simply more precise.
- hanbura 9y ago
  Arguments for British style quotes: - doesn't mutate the quoted string - fewer weird edge cases - encodes more information in same amount of characters (if quote might have ended on punctuation) - needs fewer rules Arguments for American style quotes - It looks more balanced if punctuation marks that use less ink than a quotation mark come before it I think there is no surprise that hackers prefer the straight-forward way that might look marginally worse

zuzun 9y ago

If you're looking for a free resource, I found the Style Manual by the U.S. Government Printing Office a helpful reference on how to write and typeset things in English. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2008/content-detail.html https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-STYLEMANUAL-2008/content-d...

rocqua 9y ago

What about period placement and display-style math (as opposed to inline math). Take the following example. From FOO we can conclude that: CAT = FOOBAR Does one place a period inside that display math? It has nothing to do with the equation, but it seems like the only reasonable place for it.

benji-york 9y ago
In that case, I elide the terminal.

Stratoscope 9y ago

Much of the advice here is good, but some is a bit weird. > I will give the document to my brother, Tom. (The writer has only one brother. The brother's name is nonessential and therefore set off with a comma.) > I will give the document to my brother Tom. (The writer has more than one brother. In this case, the specific brother—Tom—is essential information and should not be set off with a comma.) I know this used to be considered an important distinction, but I think few writers would worry about it today. Does the reader care if Tom is the writer's only brother? Either way the writer is talking only about Tom, not any possible other brothers. I think many writers today would leave out the comma in either case. Take an example where it's clear there is only one: I am going to visit my mother Helen. I am going to visit my mother, Helen. I don't think leaving out the comma implies that I have more than one mother, and I doubt if anyone cares much about the comma here either. The trend today is to simply leave out commas where the meaning is clear. This example of the Oxford comma is really confusing: > I am taking art history, Russian literature, microeconomics, and macroeconomics next semester. It's a valid point that omitting the Oxford comma could make it sound like "microeconomics and macroeconomics" is a single course, but using the comma makes it sound like the first three courses are being taken this semester and macroeconomics next semester. It should be rewritten: > Next semester I am taking art history, Russian literature, microeconomics, and macroeconomics. There is a similar situation where the Oxford comma is needed in the programming joke: There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. It ruins the joke (to my eyes) if you leave it out: There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. And enough with the commas already in a sentence like this: > Your work has been, frankly, awful. Ugh. Does anyone actually write that instead of: Your work has been frankly awful. (Of course I would never say that to someone but would find a more constructive way to put it.) My advice: Write simply and clearly. Know these purported rules but take them with a healthy grain of salt. Omit unnecessary punctuation where the meaning is clear to the reader. And if you need extra punctuation to avoid confusion, consider rewriting the sentence for clarity.

rocqua 9y ago
Regarding the final example, I disagree. "Your work has been frankly awful" has frankly as an adverb. That is, it was awful in a frank way. "Your work has been, frankly, awful" makes it clear that frankly is a parenthetical remark that isn't part of the sentence. With commas 'frankly' modifies how the writer intends the sentence to be received. Without, it modifies how awful the writer things your work has been. I suppose in some situations, the absurdity of 'being awful in a frank way' is sufficient to resolve the ambiguity.

happy-go-lucky 9y ago

As an aspiring technical writer, these were my go-to references. https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ https://brians.wsu.edu/common-errors/ https://brians.wsu.edu/common-errors/ http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html

mysterypie 9y ago

Talking about punctuation abuse, people that litter their emails or texts with ellipses is something I can't figure out: "Hey! I haven't heard from you in a while... I'm still in Boston... Can't complain cause it's been good... I saw the circus before it closed..." What do they think they're saying with all those crazy unneeded ellipses?

oddlyaromatic 9y ago
Lots of people do this to connect loosely related sentences because to them the "..." reads like a little pause. I guess it feels more comfortable, less formal, and let's them get the words out without worrying about structure too much.
3pt14159 9y ago
Two otherwise very smart family members of mine both used to do this. It takes sitting down and explaining that email isn't a voicemail. We're not "hearing" the pause when we read, we're just confused and it makes the person writing seem dumber than they actually are.
cup-of-tea 9y ago
I believe it is due to an unwillingness to make a concrete statement. A full stop is strong and is equivalent to speech in a flat and confident tone. The ellipsis seems to stand in for short disclaimer phrases like "by the way", "in my opinion", "in case you were wondering", etc.

osteele 9y ago

Fun! I'd like to see this for other natural languages, and for programming languages.

SeanLuke 9y ago

http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-marks.html#adjacentpunctuation http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/quotation-marks.html#adja... > Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation. I firmly refuse to go along with this nonsense. http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html > The em dash is typically used without spaces on either side, and that is the style used in this guide. Most newspapers, however, set the em dash off with a single space on each side. Isn't this is US versus Britain, not "newspapers" versus "typical use"? And AFAIK it's not a "single space": it's ideally a half-space (in US style). The problem with no space is that your eyes can't easily disambiguate it from a hyphenated single word.

Harvey-Specter 9y ago
http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american-style.html http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/british-versus-american-s... > American style places commas and periods inside the quotation marks, even if they are not in the original material. British style (more sensibly) places unquoted periods and commas outside the quotation marks. Turns out that you (and I) prefer the British style.
mlevental 9y ago
>I firmly refuse to go along with this nonsense. here here.
- insertnickname 9y ago
  Hear, hear
  - mlevental 9y ago
    thank you
namelost 9y ago
British is an en dash separated by spaces, American is an em dash with no spaces.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

thomasfoster96 9y ago

> Commas and periods that are part of the overall sentence go inside the quotation marks, even though they aren’t part of the original quotation. Please never do this. Commas and full stops have meaning. You’re modifying the original quote without telling the reader that you have done so. How this became the accepted practice in so many style guides and grammar checkers I will never understand. I shall defer to Geoffrey Pullum’s Punctuation and human freedom [0], whose title is entirely appropriate, for justification. Steven Pinker’s The Sense of Style [1] can provide the unconvinced further justification. [0] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/punctfree.pdf http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/punctfree.pdf [1] https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/dp/0143127799 https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing/...

badcede 9y ago

Does case count as punctuation? 'I helped my uncle Jack off a horse.'

jwilk 9y ago

> Requests that are phrased as questions should end with a period. > Would you please send this report to the person indicated on the cover. Wait, really? IANA native speaker, but I don't think I've ever seen such requests without question mark.

SerLava 9y ago
Call me illiterate but that would be seen as either a mistake or as intentional rudeness. We structure instructions as requests for the sake of politeness, and using a period here would come across as a very subtle mockery of this. In context it would imply some level of disdain for the recipient's right to turn down the request.

gandutraveler 9y ago

Let Elaine do the explanation on exclamation mark : https://youtu.be/unz1CGoFVMU https://youtu.be/unz1CGoFVMU

Voodoo463 9y ago

Do you object greatly to the absence of the interrobang‽ I know I do.