ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

i hadn't spotted these replies to my question, thanks everybody this is useful. woof, if you have any uk-centric advice (i'm based in london) that would be v much appreciated

i feel like 'peek' vs 'peak' issues have suddenly gotten out of hand

so horrible

were you referring to this? https://twitter.com/StealthMountain

People confuse "loath" and "loathe" because the words are related in meaning, spelling, and etymology. Checking COCA, it looks like editors let by "loath" for "loathe" less than 5% of the time, and they allow more idiosyncratic usages (like this from the New Statesman, "to go to the study every morning after breakfast, no matter how hungover, loath, and he just sort of ground it out," seems to substitute "loath" for "loaf," but this sentence would still be confusing with the words swapped) much less than that, maybe 1 or 2% of the time. That's a good track record for a totally understandable confusion/mix-up/typo, from the people who, more than anyone, are the gatekeepers of change for written standard American English.

i get why regular people might get the two confused. people who write or edit for a living should know the difference!

and btw "loath" in that sentence you quoted is pretty standard -- it's just a synonym for "reluctant". though i agree it is used pretty artfully

Yeah, I know what it's a synonym for, and I'm getting it in context in the original. It helps to know that it was speech and that it was Martin Amis.

People who write and edit for a living are (1) also people; (2) occasionally shitty spellers; and (3) put under intense pressure to produce content. Given all three contingencies/facts-of-life, 5% seems like a good track record among professionally edited English.

'You'll be amazed by our extensive refurbishments'
'You'll be amazed at our extensive refurbishments'
?

by if amazement will be continue beyond first exposure to their extensive refurbishments at if there will only be an initial reaction of amazement followed by a feeling of normality

yes, I would say amazed at suggests amazement at the sheer fact of something's existence/occurrence, but there are myriad ways to be amazed by something

yes i.e. "wtf - they've refurbished!!!!??"

vs

"look at these fucking refurbishments!!!!"

Yeah no question imo--"at" sounds weird.

They both make linguistic sense (I think) but "amazed at our extensive" is a bit tongue-twistery

all otm.

Think of it like "You will be insulted by our products!" vs "You will be insulted at our products!"

so in my job there's a lot of bulleted lists. research has shown people like them. as a result, there are a lot of interrogatives used, i wondered what people think about this kind of usage.

so an example would be:

people using interrogatives:

* which look weird to me at the start of bullets

people seem to use them to describe:

* what someone reading the page has to do
* which ways of doing it they can choose

i always want to change the last example to "the things someone reading the page has to do", "the ways of doing it they can choose"

am i on any grammatical ground here? it seems beyond instinct, i just think unnecessary interrogatives look really weird. especially "what", and especially when they begin a bullet.

I agree this reads somewhat inelegantly but idk if there's a grammatical basis to overrule it. Perhaps you could argue that a pronoun without an antecedent is unclear and only valid for direct questions, not these sort of indirect ones, so they should either be reworded as direct questions, making their clumsiness more obvious, or as you suggest

our house style for this changed recently to remove the :
which meant a lot of 'you need to do the following
* thing one, which is a complete sentence but no full stop allowed
* thing two.

In your example i think 'what' and 'which' are probably more 'plain english'?? but your suggestions are correcter.

btw I meant to say that I think 'the following' before a bulleted list should have a colon, but what do I know

nb our house style only recently removed the - from web-site

Bulleted lists are the scourge of the grammar fiend. Months of my life gone to misery over them.

ah interesting - one of my colleagues hates "the following" - i guess it's close to talking about spatial parts of the page which obviously excludes some users, but i still think it has its uses. we use bulleted lists all the time - i find it strange the colon would be removed.

our style is to never use full stops at the end of bullets. we have a bulleted list for like more variable lists of things and generally to create more white space and break up big paragraphs, but we also use numbered lists for tasks which can be broken down into a list of things you should do in a given order.

our style doesn't allow us to make the bullets questions either.

I can abide bulleted lists where each element is a sentence fragment, and therefore lacks end punctuation. For example, I have fucked the following people:

- Your mom
- Your sister
- Your other sister

I am also cool with bulleted lists in which each element is a complete sentence, punctuated accordingly. For example, my sexual career includes the following conquests:

- I had sex with your mom in a gondola.
- Your sister went down on me in a movie theater.
- Your other sister allowed me various improprieties in an opera house.

HATE HATE HATE any bulleted list that tries to format itself as a deconstructed sentence, e.g., these are some of my conquests:

- Your mom,
- Your sister, and
- Your other sister.

Yeah the third option is madness. The first two are fine.

We try to avoid repeating the first word in each bullet, but it's a subject of debate I think.

this might be the right place to admit that my ilx posts are always half-done snatched moments of awful typos and errors, yet all day i spend my time feverishly discussing a word or a sentence while pointing at big screens. i think it's some kind of subconscious disease that i keep posting horrible wrong things on this board.

xxp keep disrespecting my family and the only list of bullets you'll be interested in is:

- http://i.imgur.com/9uLzEho.png

Heh. Agreed with LocalGarda on both counts; I apologize for the your/your/your, which I admit makes it a poor example.

My main point is that end punctuation depends on whether the bulleted material is or is not a sentence.

The tricky bit is treating mixed lists, where some items are sentences (or include multiple sentences) and some are not. Typically I recommend rewriting to make bullets parallel, but when this is not possible we "promote" fragments to sentences if ANY bulleted items are sentences.

our style bans end punctuation regardless.

i suspect maybe for screen readers but not sure... like would a full stop be weird when the next bullet begins as a fragment.

I don't mind banning end punctuation entirely EXCEPT when a long bullet includes more than one sentence. I wouldn't be comfortable with a list item that had a complete sentence, then another bit, but that other but didn't have something at the end.

This may never come up in your world but it comes up in mine from time to time.

we would always use dashes or whatever and generally try to write it in a way that avoided it being separate sentences. ideally the bullet wouldn't be really long but that's inevitable sometimes.

I am not a writer, as everyone who has attempted to read my ILX posts will be glad to hear, but I quite like

- thing one, and
- thing two;
- additionally, final thing three.

e.g. I was looking at some list of instructions for applying for something and there was a bulleted list to mean "you must do all of these things: one <AND> two <AND> three", and then there was a bulleted list to mean "you may need to do something else if: x <OR> y <OR> z", and then there was a third bulleted list where I couldn't work out if it was an and-list or an or-list

however, despite my confusion perhaps it was not at all confusing to normal people, as I often find ambiguities-to-me in written instructions which nobody else has ever found ambiguous

No, I think your instincts are right. Making one of/all of explicit is important.

I don't mind starting with relatives (which is what they are, I think, rather than interrogatives) - they make for complete clauses that jump off the initial colon easily enough.

i find which okay-ish but what always looks v strange to me. i know it's sort of a personal thing though.

And yeah, I work same place as Lg (different team) and I am guiltily aware of sometimes contorting to avoid two sentences in one, non-end-stopped bullet.

Xp
Yeah... thinking about it I'm sure I recently saw one of those "what you'll get"-type heads that introduced ambiguity.

haha weirdly i don't find it as annoying in headings. not necessarily. i guess i just find lots and lots of the time in the bullet scenario, instead of saying "which" or "what" you can use the specific noun you're talking about.

Totally understand that you need a lot of format muscle if you want to effectively communicate something conditional like document requirements for e.g., a passport application.

You need one of the following:
- Thing,
- Thing, or
- Thing

~ AND ~

One of the following:
- Thing,
- Thing, or
- Thing

~ OR ~

A signed affidavit stating the following:
- Thing,
- Thing, or
- Thing

In those cases, whatever you feel you need to do is probably justifiable. But in my world most of the time people are just caught up with listing stuff and they can't stop themselves. Plus someone told them a bulleted list was a good way to "break up the text."

Oddly, for centuries, people have been somehow able to read entire BOOKS that were full of nothing but paragraphs. Can you imagine?

imo, bulleted lists are somewhat analogous to earlier introductions of punctuation marks or upper and lower case letters into text. They are a visual aid to absorbing the content of text more smoothly and easily. They can, like commas, be abused, but as with commas there are gradations of accepted use which shade gradually into abuse. There's no one right rule you can apply in every case.

Ye Mad Puffin responds poorly to the 'deconstructed sentence' style of bulleted list, and therefore would seek to dissuade its use, but I would say that so long as resorting to a bulleted list allows the content to be absorbed more rapidly and completely than attempting some other presentation, then its use is justified, regardless of how grammatically heterogeneous the individual items are. I'd agree with Ye Mad Puffin to the degree that one ought to try to homogenize the elements of the list insofar as it is possible to do so without impairing its fluidity. What matters most is getting your points across.

homogenize without impairing fluidity otm

i enjoyed your initial post on the grounds of clarity, ye mad puffin

i also think you are otm about following phrase structure in a bulleted list

our editors tend to change lengthy instructive paras to bulleted lists. We often do a lot of technical or listy stuff though.

this might be the right place to admit that my ilx posts are always half-done snatched moments of awful typos and errors, yet all day i spend my time feverishly discussing a word or a sentence while pointing at big screens. i think it's some kind of subconscious disease that i keep posting horrible wrong things on this board.

― japanese mage (LocalGarda), Friday, May 20, 2016 3:21 PM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is my life also
we have a rule now about not spending time on MS Word formatting in meetings

xp yeah Puffin otm. Bullets work really well for screen-based, task-driven, fuck-i-just-have-to-do-this stuff (like literally passports, that's a chunk of my world), but that gets turned into "let's make a huge long list", rather than "here's what you need, arranged clearly" in the wrong hands.

and I also like being able to come here to post tangled over-compressed upside-down sentences with typos and adjectival pile-ups when I spend my days thinking "Can I make this simpler and clearer? What's my blinding move that renders this fucking thicket of legislation & over-explanation redundant and just tells someone what they have to do?"

bless you

lots of enjoyable/useful otm here. so many emails I get are basically just
- sentences broken up
- into bullets
- for no apparent reason
- or a mentality overwhelmed by powerpoint

particularly enjoyable are the ones where someone has started bulleting relatively concisely, but with the bullets gradually unspooling into long, caveated responses. if i put bullet points here my thoughts will appeared *ordered*.

Must admit that over the years my ilx style has rather more taken over my email etc protocol

Hasnt hurt a bit tbh

email and ilx style both equally atrocious tbh, part of the ongoing slide from a decade ago when i used to be meticulous about brevity and picking the right word, to now where i resemble an incontinent hippo bashing at a computer.

I wont have that said nor ungainsaid no matter how ungainly yr saying

Unfortunate headline

http://i.imgur.com/vW36Zko.jpg?1

anyone ever done much commercial copy?

i've started doing the odd bit of this as a sort of moonlighting evening thing, the money is decent and it's good for tax reasons to have more than one client besides my day job.

but it is also kinda hilarious. i'm working on the brand bible for a hotel in dubai - i came in drunk last night and the crazier the shit i put in the more they seem to like it. i wrote "a retreat for modern-minded guests that seek a rich mix of thought and action" and the client is like "love this, brilliant!"

seems like a sort of hilarious career - it feels like i'm writing false scripture or something.

I do a little of that. Always feel a little dirty afterward.

Our office has publications that report actual news, but the sales staff also sells these little supplements that are very much geared toward the advertiser. Since the real reporters can't ethically write those, and I'm not a real reporter, I get stuck with them every so often.

I wrote 750 words on how wonderful the power company is for putting colored lights on our river bridges. A few months later, there's the CEO and the mayor holding up a framed copy of my story on Facebook. Made me want to jump off one of those bridges.