Syntactic heresies OR Clearly there's something wrong with me

[learnedax]

I opened up Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and I do not make it through the acknowledgments before snidely thinking to myself "Oh, the author's one of those grammarians." Which is to say, she has not seen the light and so does not use the serial comma. Apparently that inelegant ambiguity is more tolerated in her native Britain, however, which I should perhaps take as an extenuating circumstance.

Comments

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

The serial comma is an abomination! It was sometimes referred to at the optional comma. I never use it, and tend to frown on writing that does.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

The serial comma enhances clarity,* improves consistency, and reduces complexity. Avoiding it leads to clumsy additional rules such as "add the serial comma back in when the last item includes a conjunction" or "use the serial comma when the list items are sufficiently long". The reasoning for its removal was purely technological, and we have certainly passed the age when such dire space-saving techniques were so necessary as to allow mangling decent lists.

(Mostly, of course, I was noting how readily grammarians can identify those of another faction; the lines of this debate have been drawn for some time.)

*Yes, I know there are cases where using the serial comma is still ambiguous. However, those cases are ambiguous without the comma as well.

[doozer4200.livejournal.com]

Personally I'm a big fan of the serial comma (which, as per the Wiki entry, I've called "the Harvard comma"). I was taught to write with it. During the torturous college newspaper days, my serial commas disappeared because Associated Press style frowns tremendously upon the serial comma, but here in my Ivy League days, it is back. Although I should really see what the MLA and Chicago folks say about it...

Can I say, I just love that people care? I guess it's fitting that I get to torment the freshman writing kiddies next fall.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

MLA, Chicago, and my longtime guide Strunk & White all strongly side with the serial comma.

Everyone should care about language. I personally care about being able to knowingly abuse it, as well...

[zuleikhajami.livejournal.com]

which I should perhaps take as an extenuating circumstance.

Yes, you should. In general, she's pro-commas, and she acknowledges the US convention. Plus, the book is very fun.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm warming to her, despite not quite sharing her activist streak. She sometimes "corrects" things that I think are genuine stylistic choices, but in general she seems sane.

[perbac.livejournal.com]

!

I happened also to pick this up recently (last weekend) and the lack-of-serial-comma'ing also caught my eye. Sigh.

But apparently you're one of those people who puts his periods inside his quote-marks.. whatever it is that that is called (think she even referenced it in one of the 10 pages I've read). Hmph.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Well, that's actually a more complex area in my book, but I'm largely in your camp. Because the standard (merely for typesetting niceness) of punctuation inside is so complete in America, in formal non-technical writing I tend to place them there. In informal writing I place them on the outside, because that's the logical place for it, but I am considering the British practice of allowing a quotation that includes a terminal punctuation mark to end a sentence. (So that one does not have to write "He said 'Stop!'.".) And it is in fact this usage that you see above.

In more technical writing, I will always be explicit about the contents of a string.

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

You're hmphing putting periods inside quotation marks? As opposed to what? I just skimmed through the period and quotation marks sections of Karen Gordon's "The Well-tempered Sentence" and can't find a case of a period after the quotation marks, although she does have a question mark outside in the example:
Who was it who wrote, "Life is a stage attacked by an idiot"?

I'm also a serial comma fan, but comma use is one of the big Brit/US divides.

[laurion]

Your question mark example illustrates again my preferences towards disambiguation. Here the comma lies outside the quote to indicate that it terminates the question asked by Ms. Gordon, and is not the terminator of the quote. For proper clarity it should probably read: Who was it who wrote, "Life is a stage attacked by an idiot."? When directly quoting, one should try to maintain the punctuation and flow of the original source. This, of course, is in contrast to the use of quotation marks to delineate dialogue or "fragmentary references"(Sometimes used for sarcasm indicators, or emphasis, or a 'his words, not mine' situation).

Generally, I try to apply the punctuation where it best demonstrates what the purpose of the punctuation is and the source of the punctuation is. So depending on context I might have punctuation inside my quotation marks, outside, or both.

[perbac.livejournal.com]

As opposed to putting periods on the outside. I am not sure - it's partially related to what laurion said about disambiguation, but there's also a personal neuroticism about making things pair up. (Trying to analyze this for the first time; please bear with me.) In my head, a garden-variety sentence should end in a period, question mark, or exclamation point. A sentence that begins and ends with special punctuation (for lack of better term; that is, the sentence is wholly a quotation or parenthetical statement) should end in the special punctuation, meaning that the period, question mark, or exclamation point should be on the inside. A sentence that contains a quotation/parenthetical mark pair, but that is not surrounded by the pair, is really just a garden-variety sentence with some special stuff in the middle - which means that it should end in a period, question mark, or exclamation point, *not* the special punctuation. Same with other punctuation that is part of the framework of the outer sentence and *not* part of the "special punctuation" fragment. Maybe that's the key - that the punctuation belongs to the outer sentence, so it has no business being inside inner sub-sentences/fragments/parentheticals/quotes/etc. (sorry; I seem to be missing some vocabulary).

Example 1:
This is a sentence.

Example 2:
"I'm quoting something."

Example 3a:
This sentence contains a "quoted" word.

Example 3b:
I'm not sure if this is "correct".

Example 3c:
I'm not sure if this is "correct", but it is more logical to me.

...

Strangely enough, quoted dialog has never bothered me (having the comma before the quotes instead of after):

"Blah blah," he said.

Maybe I have been conditioned to special case it (under my personal "grammar logic" rules) in my head.

*frown* Maybe I am a bad person that should be arrested and reconditioned by the Punctuation Police. I never thought of that.

This is weird. I haven't thought about my basic writing assumptions in years.

Interesting timing

[anu3bis.livejournal.com]

BalsamicDragon and I just had a nice discussion on the use of the serial comma. While she is ambivalent on the use, I am passionate that it is necessary for clarity and consistency.

It's rather odd, because there are very few issues I am passionate about. I'm quite easygoing, forgiving on any communications outside the formal, but when I see a bad piece of business writing, I have to rip it apart. Fortunately, it's part of my job.

I keep red pens on the desk for the folks I know can take the criticism well. The green pens are for correcting folks who don't know any better or might fly off the handle at seeing so much red on one page. One of my team's just graduated from green to red.

[laurion]

Hey, if it's good enough for Oxford (Britain), and Harvard (old enough to be British), it's good enough for me. It's such a small use of ink, and goes very far in the disambiguation of sentence meaning. Optional, perhaps, but practial in the extreme.