Only tangentially related, but it's the weekend, so what the hell, enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g
Even more tangential but amusing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF4qii8S3gw (Borge, Phonetic Pronunciation)
Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
31–40 of 162 posts
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#32Ouch. 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.
The piece also asserted that "word" and "whirred" are "pronounced exactly the same".
They aren't. The first consonant is different; IPA [w] vs. IPA [hw].
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#33I 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…
Consider though: To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God [1] Is the writer's mother Ayn Rand? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma#Creating_ambiguity
Any use of commas in a list for something other than separating items, regardless of Oxford comma, makes for ambiguous sentences. That one is just written to make the Oxford comma a culprit. Try:
To my mother, Ayn Rand, Jimmy, Bobbie and Sue.Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#34Only tangentially related, but it's the weekend, so what the hell, enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g
i need to add some pop here
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#35Stopped 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.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#36In every case where you have to decide between two options and both have advantages and disadvantages you should go with the popular one. In the case of the Oxford comma this means following what most of the world (including the publishing world) does and avoid it. The grammar of many languages forbids the Oxford comma, so there's no reason to keep this controversy going on with no real purpose.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#37In 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."
Funny. Not a great sentence. By the time you reach the end, you've forgotten where you were. The aside, consisting of two sentences with a conjunction, is too long. I suspect the conjunction is the problem.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider though: To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God [1] Is the writer's mother Ayn Rand? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma#Creating_ambiguity
Any use of commas in a list for something other than separating items, regardless of Oxford comma, makes for ambiguous sentences. That one is just written to make the Oxford comma a culprit. Try: To my mother, Ayn Rand, Jimmy, Bobbie and Sue.
Not so. There, you unambiguously have a list. If you have a list with a comma in an item, you separate list items with semicolons. So if Ayn Rand was the mother, then it would be "To my mother, Ayn Rand; Jimmy; Bobbie and Sue." The original is difficult because, if "Ayn Rand" is actually subordinated and not a list item, then you don't have a place to put a list separator at all.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#39I 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…
This reminds me the book: Eats(,) Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#40Most 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, cache expiration and off-by-one errors."