punctuation

Are You In Style?

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This post by Kate Siegel Bandos originally appeared on San Francisco Book Review on 2/5/15.

Fashion and other popular magazines, TV shows, and numerous websites tell us how we should be dressing, doing our hair, and decorating our homes so that we are always IN STYLE. What about publishers? Are you paying attention to being up-to-date with writing styles?

If you are working with a seasoned editor, hopefully they know the latest style rules for writing. Of course, there is more than one “style” book that details the dos and don’ts of writing. However, you will always be safe—especially when writing materials for journalists, if you follow the AP (Associated Press) style guidelines.

How writers and journalists feel about commas is almost as divisive as the views of Democrats and Republicans. The Oxford comma (also known as the “serial comma” or “Harvard comma”) is the name given to the optional final comma in a series. In the phrase “ham, egg, and chips,” it’s the comma between “egg” and “and.” While the AP Stylebook advises against it, others insist on it because it makes the meaning clearer. Like everything that is optional, it has its adherents and its detractors. But make a decision and be consistent.

For the 2014 edition of AP Stylebook, there were five key changes that you should be aware of for both your book(s) and all media materials:

 

Read the full post on San Francisco Book Review.

 

Single Quotes or Double Quotes? It’s Really Quite Simple.

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This post by Andrew Heisel originally appeared on Slate on 10/21/14.

If you are an American, using quotation marks could hardly be simpler: Use double quotation marks at all times unless quoting something within a quotation, when you use single. It’s different in the greater Anglosphere, where they generally use singles in books and doubles in newspapers. It’s still pretty simple, but nothing so straightforward as here.

Yet some of us don’t seem happy with what we’ve got. For several years now in teaching writing classes to college freshmen, I’ve noticed some students adopt another rule: double quotes for long quotations, single quotes for single words or short phrases. They’ll quote a long passage from Measure for Measure accurately, but when they want to quote one of Shakespeare’s words, a cliché, or some dubious concept like “virtue,” they’ll go with single quotes.

It took me a while to understand what was going on, but after thoroughly studying it I developed a rigorous explanation for this staggering decline in standards: kids today.

But then I looked up from their papers to find this usage in the manuscript of a friend’s novel. Then I saw them in another friend’s manuscript—this time, of an academic book. Then I turned to the Internet and they were everywhere—in a local news story, in a paper by a college professor, in a blog on social marketing, in a blog on the education system, on the website of the Children’s Literacy Foundation. In each case, the same short/single, long/double quote rule was followed.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

12 Mistakes Nearly Everyone Who Writes About Grammar Mistakes Makes

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This post, by Jonathon Owen, originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 11/20/13.

There are a lot of bad grammar posts in the world. These days, anyone with a blog and a bunch of pet peeves can crank out a click-bait listicle of supposed grammar errors. There’s just one problem — these articles are often full of mistakes of one sort or another themselves. Once you’ve read a few, you start noticing some patterns. Inspired by a recent post titled “Grammar Police: Twelve Mistakes Nearly Everyone Makes,” I decided to make a list of my own.

1. Confusing grammar with spelling, punctuation, and usage. Many people who write about grammar seem to think that grammar means “any sort of rule of language, especially writing.” But strictly speaking, grammar refers to the structural rules of language, namely morphology (basically the way words are formed from roots and affixes), phonology (the system of sounds in a language), and syntax (the way phrases and clauses are formed from words). Most complaints about grammar are really about punctuation, spelling (such as problems with you’re/your and other homophone confusion) or usage (which is often about semantics). This post, for instance, spends two of its twelve points on commas and a third on quotation marks.

2. Treating style choices as rules. This article says that you should always use an Oxford (or serial) comma (the comma before and or or in a list) and that quotation marks should always follow commas and periods, but the latter is true only in most American styles (linguists often put the commas and periods outside quotes, and so do many non-American styles), and the former is only true of some American styles. I may prefer serial commas, but I’m not going to insist that everyone who doesn’t use them is making a mistake. It’s simply a matter of style, and style varies from one publisher to the next.

3. Ignoring register. There’s a time and a place for following the rules, but the writers of these lists typically treat English as though it had only one register: formal writing. They ignore the fact that following the rules in the wrong setting often sounds stuffy and stilted. Formal written English is not the only legitimate form of the language, and the rules of formal written English don’t apply in all situations. Sure, it’s useful to know when to use who and whom, but it’s probably more useful to know that saying To whom did you give the book? in casual conversation will make you sound like a pompous twit.

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on The Huffington Post.