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Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

stilldrinking.org

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Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#131

Post by morgante »

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…

That just seems like poking fun at a job applicant for no reason. Assuming last-modified headers weren't accurate on the website (as one would expect with some poorly crafted sites these days), that will indeed get the job done with a minimum of fuss and effort; assuming this is a one-off script, actually parsing the page would be pointless.

Perhaps posting it to his blog was excessive, but it is a way of getting shared code out there.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#132

Post by chinpokomon »

vacri wrote: post #106
snowwrestler wrote: post #88

I 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…

On a tangent about consistency, I find it amusing when journalists slave themselves to the rules and create silly sentences. The one I'm thinking of is the convention that numbers under 10 are spelled out, and numbers 10 or higher are put in numeral form. Some journalists abandon consistency to stick to the 'rules': "the policy is predicted to have payoffs in eight to 12 years". I think I've even seen it in hyphenate…

The real reason for not using numerals is that in most typesets, and even how we learn to write them, they look like capital letters. This causes the reader to draw unnecessary attention to the numbers themselves in the same way which ALL CAPS might. "The five of us went skiing," vs. "the 5 of us went skiing" -- the number of skiers isn't interesting, the activity is the important part of that sentence and the number is secondary information.

The author of the article is right that writing is both a skill and an art form. The skilled writer can alter the way a sentence is understood by their choice of punctuation, but abandoning the rules should only be done when the author understands the consequences of breaking those rules; using explicit choices to guide the user to deeper understanding of the intended meaning.

"The policy is predicted to have payoffs in 8 to 12 years," "the policy is predicted to have payoffs in eight to 12 years," or "the policy is predicted to have payoffs in eight to twelve years." If I were writing that sentence, I would probably go with the first style as I believe it is the best for conveying what is important to the reader. All three say the same thing, but mixing the spelt and numeral forms is the most distracting and least legible.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#133

Post by e12e »

Chattered wrote: post #86
DanBC wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several people in this thread are claiming that punctuation is used to convey information about how to pronounce the sentence. You're saying (and I tend to agree with you) that written punctuation is about meaning, and not about where a speaker would pause to take a breath. Can these two be kludged into a unified meaning? "Write better so that your written words sound good when spoken"?

I'm saying that punctuation has already solved this problem with the semi-colon. If you have two sentences where the second follows the other so closely that there is barely a breath in between, use a semi-colon rather than a stop. You convey both meaning and flow at the same time, and you keep the grammaticasters happy.

Ah, I love semicolons -- but they're not always as aesthetic as commas (and vice-versa). I find this is mostly a question of overall style and context (the more pretentious the text, the more out of place the semicolon; unless you're aspiring to be a pretentious (post-)modern text -- then the semicolon wins).

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#135

Post by Terr_ »

vacri wrote: post #106
snowwrestler wrote: post #88

I 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…

On a tangent about consistency, I find it amusing when journalists slave themselves to the rules and create silly sentences. The one I'm thinking of is the convention that numbers under 10 are spelled out, and numbers 10 or higher are put in numeral form. Some journalists abandon consistency to stick to the 'rules': "the policy is predicted to have payoffs in eight to 12 years". I think I've even seen it in hyphenate…

IMO there's another reason to use alphabetic-vs-numeral amounts: How you expect the audience to use the number.

If the numbers are figurative, poetic, or you want the reading-flow uninterrupted, you probably want letters, meaning that Carl Sagan gets quoted as "billions and billions", rather than "1,000,000,000s and 1,000,000,000s". Similarly, "we tried three times", rather than "we tried 3 times".

On the other extreme, if you expect people to compare or analyze with numbers as they read them, favor numerals. "A fan favorite, bookies give him odds of 10 to 3."

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#137

Post by snowwrestler »

resu_nimda wrote: post #113
snowwrestler wrote: post #88

I 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 nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable. Is this written in the stars somewhere? This is exactly the kind of prescriptivism the author is arguing against. If you fall more towards that side of the spectrum, that's fine, but don't believe you're somehow more factually correct. Your interpretations of consistency and readability are not uni…

Actually, you're right. If one considers comedy to be a form of art, then being purposefully inconsistent with the Oxford Comma can create comedic ambiguity. Unfortunately the author seems to dismiss those sorts of sentences as contrived.

Aside from that, I would contend that the vast majority of serial commas are incidental to artistic merit. If you're deciding on the Oxford Comma, you've already used at least one comma, and you're just deciding on the last one. That seems to me a pretty marginal decision.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#138

Post by Flenser »

> Punctuation started with periods that told the speaker when to take a breath

A great book that looks at how punctuation characters date back to ancient greek writing and how it was used to show how text should be read is Shady Characters: Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EAA6QHC/

Edit: You can read the first chapter in the preview with pictures of the ancient texts

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#139

Post by ky3 »

tiziano88 wrote: post #107
astrobe_ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just to clarify, in Haskell: - [x,xs] is the list defined by exactly the element x followed by the element xs ; - x:xs is the list defined by the element x followed by the list xs .

And to add to this, the unspoken Hungarian notation rules have xs typed as a list.

So the 1st instance: [x,xs] looks unprofessional and n00b-ish.

It's the 2nd instance that's idiomatic.

Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.

#140

Post by Anderkent »

baddox wrote: post #127
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…

That example is horrible. > Without a serial comma, the above dedication would read: To my mother, Ayn Rand and God, a phrase ambiguous only if the reader accepts the interpretation my mother, who is both Ayn Rand and God. That's exactly the same grammatical interpretation (i.e. the comma indicates an appositive) that was suggested to be ambiguous with the Oxford comma present.

The point is no one will even consider the interpretation where his mother is god; thus the sentence is unambiguous - he is dedicating to his mother, to Ayn Rand, and to god.

The ambiguity in the example is in whether his mother is Ayn Rand, not whether she's god.

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