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Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

stilldrinking.org

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Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#71

Post by JadeNB »

kyllo wrote: post #28
marmarlade wrote: post #17

I was never taught about the Oxford Comma (I'm not a native speaker), but trained myself to use it consistently after seeing this http://jaced.com/blogpix/2013/washingtonlincolnoxford.jpg . This has made me rethink though - he makes a great point that writing is about transferring the voices in my head into the readers', so I'll keep that in mind for any creative writing. Heck, not just creative writing, I can think…

Yep, here's another fun illustration of the same issue with omitting the Oxford Comma: http://i.imgur.com/fycHx.jpg

If we're presenting comics, then: http://explosm.net/comics/2215. (It's not an Oxford comma, of course --but then, the article was about punctuation in general.)

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#72

Post by jonemo »

steve_benjamins wrote: post #7

Loved his points about how you can hear punctuation in speech: "Morgan Freeman is liberal with the commas, and Jon Stewart is a master of parentheses. Lewis Black made a career out of the exclamation point while Dennis Leary barely uses any punctuation at all." Overall, a great Sunday morning read.

This was also my favorite sentence of the piece. People sometimes criticize my writing as having to many parentheses. From now on I will just tell them to read it in the voice of Jon Stewart. Because that's exactly how I want all my texts to be read.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#73

Post by lisper »

saurik wrote: post #2

> An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice, it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea. I am more than happy to truly believe this premise (and if you read some of the things I write, and how I use punctuation, I hope the reader will agree ;P), and can come up with situations where the extra comma "breaks the rythm" and cases where it "makes the sentence". > Momentum, syncopa…

The Right Way (IMHO):

Momentum, syncopation, rhythm-and-pattern: these make a sentence flow, because...

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#74

Post by ams6110 »

johnchristopher wrote: post #54

This is really nice to have footnotes just next to the line there are called from[0]. I rarely stumble upon a web page that actually improves on the paper format but this one does. [0] There must be a better way to phrase this.

Except they're invisible if you have JS disabled, as I do for normal browsing.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#75

Post by iamdave »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #61
Hermel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. "Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. "Well, I'm a panda," he says. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enoug…

This isn't actually a case of the Oxford comma, though--it's just incorrect.

*points to the fourth sentence

The joke.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#76

Post by jacobolus »

Hermel wrote: post #50
Stratoscope wrote: post #40

Most of the time, you can use the Oxford comma, the non-Oxford comma or any other kind of comma, and it just doesn't make any difference. But sometimes you need it. Here's an example: "There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things, cache expiration, and off-by-one errors." Take out the comma and you ruin the joke - at least to my ears: "There are two hard problems in Computer Science: naming things,…

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. "Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. "Well, I'm a panda," he says. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enoug…

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/28/040628crbo_books...

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#77

Post by 30thElement »

centro wrote: post #59

I found this in the source of the page. The script also called a ruby script to send him a tweet which another script was probably monitoring to text his phone so he could screenshot the text and post to facebook via instagram. I think the "millenials" - who should be referred to as generation byte - get undeserved flak, as all generations do, for being younger and prettier and living in a different world. But this k…

If that's what made him your favorite, you really need to read his earlier post that really blew up in popularity. It's a great read. http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#78

Post by Avshalom »

SheepSlapper wrote: post #68
andolanra wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the Oxford comma does leave room for ambiguity, c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma#Creating_ambiguity Frankly, with writing in natural languages, hard-and-fast rules like, "Oxford Comma are always unambiguous," and, "Always avoid passives," tend to make your writing weaker, because there are still some cases in which Oxford Commas are ambiguous and passives are the right tool for the job. What…

From Wikipedia: "Without a serial comma, the above dedication would read... a phrase ambiguous only if the reader accepts the interpretation..." In this case the serial comma isn't creating any ambiguity, the bad writing is (and the serial comma shifts the ambiguity to the second/third item being listed). When they suggest a better way to write the example sentence, it uses the Oxford comma both times (though I'd arg…

Those two suggestions use the Oxford comma because they are suggestions for how remove ambiguity while keeping the Oxford comma.

The thing about just admitting you can rewrite a sentence to be un/less ambiguous while keeping the comma is that it simultaneously admits that you can rewrite a sentence to be un/less ambiguous without the comma... which puts us back at aesthetic arguments.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#79

Post by pests »

bencoder wrote: post #10
js2 wrote: post #8

In this case, em dashes are doing something similar to a pair of commas, which can also denote side info but they do it more casually, and parentheses. "and parentheses" what? And they are also like em dashes? Edit: Thank you for the explanation folks. For whatever reason I found the use of commas to denote the aside very difficult to parse. I think maybe it's because of the first comma after "In this case."

try: > In this case, em dashes are doing something similar to a pair of commas (which can also denote side info but they do it more casually) and parentheses. The commas after "pair of commas" are the parenthetical commas he is describing

I would have shown the example with em dashes instead of parentheses as that was the point of the sentence.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#80

Post by nitrogen »

SheepSlapper wrote: post #68
andolanra wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the Oxford comma does leave room for ambiguity, c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma#Creating_ambiguity Frankly, with writing in natural languages, hard-and-fast rules like, "Oxford Comma are always unambiguous," and, "Always avoid passives," tend to make your writing weaker, because there are still some cases in which Oxford Commas are ambiguous and passives are the right tool for the job. What…

From Wikipedia: "Without a serial comma, the above dedication would read... a phrase ambiguous only if the reader accepts the interpretation..." In this case the serial comma isn't creating any ambiguity, the bad writing is (and the serial comma shifts the ambiguity to the second/third item being listed). When they suggest a better way to write the example sentence, it uses the Oxford comma both times (though I'd arg…

There's also the semicolon.
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