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Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

graemereynolds.wordpress.com

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Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#151

Post by GhotiFish »

shreve wrote: post #59
zelos wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say most of that usage is unnecessary clutter. Hyphens are intended to disambiguate grouping of word pairs. I haven't heard of anything called a "dog hind" that could have a leg. "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." That's incorrect, isn't it? It's reinforcing the potential confusion that the hyphen is meant to avoid. Unless she really was wearing a red scarf made from someone's head?

Yes. What they were going for was "red head-scarf", but that is also questionable. I've only ever seen "head scarf" unhyphenated.

Well I don't know if this is right, but if I had to guess

red-head scarf might suggest that the flairs at the end of the scarf are red, and that it just a normal scarf https://www.google.ca/search?safe=off&tbm=isch

where as a red head-scarf would be a red... head scarf. https://www.google.ca/search?q=head+scarf&tbm=isch

Dunno. Needs more context frankly.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#152

Post by GhotiFish »

harshreality wrote: post #80
furyg3 wrote: post #10

Amazon is probably trying to correct publishers who copy+paste their hardcopy texts (from InDesign or wherever) into eBook format, taking with them artifacts from the print designer, like forced hyphenation. These artifacts from the print world are not useful in eBooks, since the reader is automatically breaking up lines based on the screen size, font, etc. http://indesignsecrets.com/field-guide-to-indesign-hyphens.p…

Check the comments after the post. That's mentioned as a possible reason and the author says that's not the case. Apparently Amazon is complaining about real hyphenated words, not line-break hyphen-ated words. [edit: It appears, though, that the author is stylistically abusing hyphens, so while they may not be wrong, they're grating to most readers. So, should Amazon be in the business of banning books on the grounds…

I don't believe that is satisfactorily disproving this position. It is very very easy to believe that the automated system trying to prevent lazy formatting is just interpreting a large prevalence of hyphenated words as line break hyphens.

Graeme merely asserts that his book was free of those, which we knew going in. It does nothing to say why Amazon was raising the issue, and it wouldn't shock me that an automated system would be unable to tell the difference.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#153

Post by mcguire »

simi_ wrote: post #44
lclarkmichalek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They derail the conversation. Of course they're annoying..

I will never mind a "Hey, you misspelled «X»". I can agree "Ha, he misspelled «Y», he's such a complete moron" is annoying/disruptive, but I don't think the answer to assholes is to stop caring about basic grammar rules. Incidentally, as an outsider I've never seen people being as careless/clueless with their language as British/American people are. A result of the education system or society, maybe.

Or possibly a result of the number of people using the language. Including those with only limited experience.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#154

Post by simi_ »

mcguire wrote: post #153
simi_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never mind a "Hey, you misspelled «X»". I can agree "Ha, he misspelled «Y», he's such a complete moron" is annoying/disruptive, but I don't think the answer to assholes is to stop caring about basic grammar rules. Incidentally, as an outsider I've never seen people being as careless/clueless with their language as British/American people are. A result of the education system or society, maybe.

Or possibly a result of the number of people using the language. Including those with only limited experience.

I was talking about native British and American speakers. Not to mention that most of the people I've been in contact with were (highly) educated.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#155

Post by ZoFreX »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #131
chimeracoder wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point was that 3 of 4 uses of hyphens were wrong. Wrong according to whom? We're not talking about writers for a newspaper or magazine, where everyone is expected to adhere to a single style for the sake of uniformity. James Joyce did a number of things "wrong" both grammatically and stylistically, but that was part of the artistic expression. It's weird, to say the least, for a bookstore to enforce style. When…

"Wrong according to whom?" According to the customer who complained about them (who is, after all, the person with the money), and anyone else who's familiar with standard English usage. Consciously choosing to break the rules and breaking them because you don't know any better are two different things.

> According to the customer who complained about them (who is, after all, the person with the money)

There is a time honoured tradition regarding what to do if you have money and don't like the artistic style of the author, and "demand their publisher pulls the book or forces the author to change their style to suit you" isn't it. (Not to mention all the happy customers who gave the book 4 & 5 star ratings and didn't complain, who are, after all, also people with money)

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#156

Post by geoelectric »

Seems like most people in the thread are missing that this started with at least one actual reader complaint, and automation was only run over the book to verify. The author of the blog says there are only one complaint, but given the rather craptastic grammar examples posted and the vitriolic stance of the author, I'm not so sure.

Also worth noting that the "automation" was a spell checker, which presumably flagged examples that aren't considered properly hyphenated in the English language.

Amazon does most certainly pull books that have bad spelling or grammar based on user complaints, and I'm glad they do so. I've stumbled into poorly self-edited Kindle books many times, and have been awfully pissed I've dropped money on them. I'm happy for some quality control.

For those that think there should be a completely hands-off release process for these books, that's just horseshit. Books have been edited pretty much since the concept of "books." If an author wants to apply back for a waiver based on their Joycean command of the English language, wonderful. For a pulp writer, I don't buy it for a second.

I'm also waiting to hear about the rash of automated spell or grammar checking causing issues. Because right now what I see is one frustrated author throwing around accusations and any number of satisfied authors who actually wrote their books correctly.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#157

Post by pjbrunet »

jgrahamc wrote: post #47

So, I looked through the preview of the author's "High Moor" which is available on Amazon.co.uk and I see things like: "One of them picked up what looked like a dog's hind-leg and put it in a white plastic bag." "With the two-week Easter holiday just over a month away, ..." "The woman's white hair was hidden by a red-head scarf, ..." "The door of one of the expensive motor-homes opened ..." Seems to me Amazon may hav…

None of these are bad enough to ban a book. Even though "red-head scarf" is strange, it sounds like intentional wordplay in that sentence. Remember, writing is a creative activity. It's not engineering.

Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#158

Post by ikeboy »

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Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation

#160

Post by arrrg »

DanBC wrote: post #17

When you have "grammar matters" in big fucking letters at the top of a blog you really need to proof read. > So, chuckling to myself, I sent back a response pointing out that the use of a hyphen to join two words together was perfectly valid in the English language and included a handy link to the Oxford English Dictionaries definition page which described it’s usage. POSSESSIVE ITS HAS NO APOSTROPHE. Normally I real…

I really, really don’t get your point. I’m utterly confused by it. This is an incidental non-issue that couldn’t be any less relevant if it wanted to. There is no possible world in which this could ever be of the tiniest relevance.
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