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Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
91–100 of 162 posts
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#92This was a joy to read. I highly recommend reading it out loud to someone. Try the techniques the author mentioned, and laugh out loud when he uses one of the techniques ironically.
A wonderfully written piece of art. And excellently communicated, too.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#93This 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 margin notes are not a web innovation. They are common in textbooks.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without the commas, it sounds to me like the author is excited and animated about his topic, tumbling forward. I imagine him gesticulating wildly. I guess you were imagining more of a measured pronouncement, with paused emphasis to cause us to carefully consider each element. As he says, the punctuation imparts different styles. I think the tumbling-forward interpretation works better with the list having four elemen…
I've read that sentence a few times now both imposing and not imposing the imaginary comma in my head and it still sounds like either a mistake or a particularly weird choice of rhythm. Without an oxford comma, a four letter list sounds like "This...that...c and d do that!" -- which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence about the final two things. People don't talk that wa…
The pace of the sentence is accelerating, launching into the remainder of the sentence.
Momentum - 3 syllables
Syncopation - 4 syllables
Rhythm and pattern - 5 syllables
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#95This 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.
A similar effect can be achieved using just CSS: float the marginal note left or right, set the width and apply (negative) horizontal margins to move it outside the main text block, and if required use relative positioning to shift it up so the baselines of the body text and the marginal note align.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#96This article makes me think about a question to which I still haven't found an answer:
For me (I'm not a native english speaker by the way), when reading out loud a text, all commas are "translated" by a pause. But there are some sentences for which I don't understand why a comma is used, as I wouldn't pause at the comma when saying these sentences out loud.
For example:
> The problem is that many people have horrible rhythm when speaking, too.
or
> Thank you, John.
In both these sentences, when reading them out loud, I wouldn't pause where there is a comma. And I actually never heard someone pause at these commas.
So am I mistaken in thinking that commas should always be orally translated by pauses? Or do you pause at the comma when saying these sentences?
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've read that sentence a few times now both imposing and not imposing the imaginary comma in my head and it still sounds like either a mistake or a particularly weird choice of rhythm. Without an oxford comma, a four letter list sounds like "This...that...c and d do that!" -- which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence about the final two things. People don't talk that wa…
> Without an oxford comma, a four letter list sounds like "This...that...c and d do that!" It sounds more like: bit, bat, bot and bet do that to my ears. E.g the list flows in a continuous motion, and the "and" just denotes the last item ("and finally"), something like x:xs in Haskell but in reverse! "this, that, c : d do that" > which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence…
I think the programmers among us are infected by the use of punctuation marks as part of the syntax. Many programming languages just hijack punctuations marks: C's field.selector is plain silly when you think about it and about the fact that the colon was available; and now something less natural than the period must be used to separate statements. As for Haskell, I find that the ML family is IMO quite remarkable for its tradition of terrible syntax choices (again, why x:xs when x,xs was an option? And that convention of putting commas at the beginning of a line!?).
It seems to me that arguing about what a comma means when put in this or that place is symptomatic of this programmer mindset. Natural languages are ambiguous, redundant and sometimes inconsistent by non-design. And so is their punctuation. Nobody understand punctuation, especially programmers.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#98Ouch. Fairly nicely written piece about punctuation, and generally nicely formatted with justification, properly indented paragraphs, use of em dashes, and so on; and then it uses straight quotes everywhere. While I'm generally used to straight quotes everywhere on the web, the additional standard set by the rest of the typesetting and the topic meant that their omission here was that much more glaring.
Seriously? I can think of nothing about this article that bothers me less than that.
In my world, quotes are quotes and the distinction between ways of drawing them is infinitely irrelevant. That this is not true to someone else is actually surprising me.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#99Stopped reading after footnote 2.
I did too. Couldn't figure out why that was even in there. It seemed so ludicrously out of place but so intentional.
I found it very entertaining. And humanizing of the writer - it shouted "hey, look, this isn't your usual rant on punctuation" early on in the piece, before the writing style had had time to otherwise distinguish itself from the hundreds of other articles we've read on stuff like this. Like some weird kind of foreshadowing.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#100I understand punctuation fine, and I think the author is wrong. While commas in general are not governed by hard rules, the "Oxford comma" is an extremely specific use of the comma: to separate the listing of 3 or more equal items. There's nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable. No offense to the author, who might be reading this, but it's possi…
There's a difference between throwing out all the rules, and throwing out merely the useless ones: splitting infinitives, ending sentences with prepositions, and such.
Having said that, I'm on-the-fence about consistent Oxford Commaing. The article's suggestion to decide case-by-case is interesting (and the argument is very well written) but I'd have to read a longer piece that alternated to find out whether it bothers me.