{"id":469,"date":"2008-03-26T20:25:19","date_gmt":"2008-03-27T00:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=469"},"modified":"2013-09-22T23:55:32","modified_gmt":"2013-09-23T04:55:32","slug":"commas-and-other-editing-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=469","title":{"rendered":"Commas, And Other Editing Issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never met a punctuation mark I didn’t like, and while I have made it my personal mission — indeed, the very purpose of my blogging career — to bring back the emdash and its misunderstood cousin, the semicolon… and mmm… ellipsis… though the comma is perhaps my very favourite piece of punctuation; maybe it was all those typing classes repeating “I’m King Comma” ad nauseum, or perhaps simply its use for adding small pauses to cadence which I use and abuse to mimic my halting style of oration. So you can imagine that I am in general in favour of the “serial comma”, currently a source of discussion over at John Scalzi’s blog “Whatever”<\/a> (though I’m also in favour of using the ampersand {&<\/strong>} within a list to unambiguously identify compound elements, even though many editors seem to cringe at the “informal” character). I suppose that makes me evil, but it’s not the only thing.<\/p>\n

I packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna, and peanut butter & jam. {deliciously evil}
\nI packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna, and peanut butter and jam.
\nI packed a variety of sandwiches: ham, tuna and peanut butter and jam.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, I’m not nearly enough of a language geek to actually engage in any kind of debate like this, and had to look up what a serial comma<\/a> was (though I do instinctively use them even if I don’t know what they’re called). These sorts of posts by authors<\/a> are interesting to me moreso for the insight into the world of professional publishing. I’ve had my share of experience from both sides of the editing\/reviewing processes in scientific journals, and it generally hasn’t gone very well for me. I tend to take editorial comments too personally (especially “this would not be of general interest to our audience”), and often have a really hard time making changes to my manuscripts. So it’s healthy to see that real live successful authors also get edited (and I’m going to remember <\/em>“stet”).<\/p>\n

This also reminded me of a broker report (for Q9) I read recently that included an interrobang in the title (“Trading Below Replacement Value?! Upping to ACTION LIST”). I mentioned this to Wayfare, in part because we both own a bit of Q9, and we’re both down quite a bit on it. She hadn’t heard of an interrobang before, and it instantly became both her new favourite punctuation mark as well as her word of the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never met a punctuation mark I didn’t like, and while I have made it my personal mission — indeed, the very purpose of my blogging career — to bring back the emdash and its misunderstood cousin, the semicolon… and mmm… ellipsis… though the comma is perhaps my very favourite piece of punctuation; maybe it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}