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Abbreviations in the middle of a sentence (When he was talking with Mr. St. Cyr, he saw a bird. Then...”)
by riahi 6y ago
Abbreviations in the middle of a sentence (When he was talking with Mr. St. Cyr, he saw a bird. Then...”)
- kwhitefoot 6y agoExcept that in the tradition current when I was growing up neither Mr nor St require a dot because they both include the last letter of the word. The dot is meant to indicate that letters following it have been omitted.
- leephillips 6y agoThis is a key punctuation difference between North American and UK English. In NA, we use the dot here, but not in the UK. Actually, I’ve started to adopt the UK convention, because I think it looks neater.
- xxpor 6y agoMeanwhile, the house style at the NYT is to use periods between each letter of an acronym in certain cases, e.g. W.H.O., D.O.D, and U.N., but not NASA for some reason. I've had to occasionally append to existing texts that use the period between each letter style, and I have to say, it's incredibly annoying to physically type.
- leephillips 6y agoIn regard to the NYT style: that’s because WHO, DOD, and UN are not in fact acronyms, while NASA is. So it’s entirely consistent.