ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

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Which would you use?:

She had been day- (and night-) dreaming.
She had been day-(and night-)dreaming.
She had been day (and night) dreaming.

I'm inclined to go with the third one.

― Eyeball Kicks, Thursday, 17 May 2007 09:27 (nineteen years ago)

may as well be the second one

― RJG, Thursday, 17 May 2007 11:22 (nineteen years ago)

Everyone dreams at night, every night. Why say it?

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 17 May 2007 11:37 (nineteen years ago)

Also: the sentence makes the two sound equivalent, but daydreams are totally different than night dreams.

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 17 May 2007 11:49 (nineteen years ago)

different from!

― ledge, Thursday, 17 May 2007 11:50 (nineteen years ago)

i.e. "She had been dreaming during the day and at night." - The question arises: Does she sleep 24 hours a day?

xpost yeah you're right! how about "they are different things to night dreams"? that's what i wrote first!

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 17 May 2007 11:51 (nineteen years ago)

"Different to" is always wrong IMHO. Ah, I haven't written IMHO for years! Golden days of web-slang they were! YMMV.

― ledge, Thursday, 17 May 2007 12:03 (nineteen years ago)

Ignore the stupidity of the sentence! I just want a vote on the correct spacing/use of hyphens! Anyway, the full sentence actually reads (no joke): "She had been day- (and night-) dreaming about Hank, her handsome flying doctor."

I'm gonna send this off in the next half hour, so unless anyone has a better idea, I'll do what RJG says.

― Eyeball Kicks, Thursday, 17 May 2007 12:12 (nineteen years ago)

Dodgy commas in that last line... sorry RJG.

― Eyeball Kicks, Thursday, 17 May 2007 12:13 (nineteen years ago)

"She had been dreaming day and night about Hank, her handsome flying doctor."

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 17 May 2007 12:26 (nineteen years ago)

Tracer's got it. IMHO.

― Madchen, Thursday, 17 May 2007 15:37 (nineteen years ago)

Re line breaks, I have no idea how the British do it. In the US, it's generally by syllable. You're right that double consonants are generally split, e.g. "bas-ket" or "lis-ten" or "hap-pen" (but not always, e.g. "chick-en" -- probably because "c" is not a strong enough letter to end a syllable). I also think that prefixes and suffixes tend to be neatly broken from their root words, e.g. "peeling" is always broken "peel-ing" rather than "pee-ling." It also seems to be inadvisable to have a syllable end with a short vowel sound, e.g., "rad-ish" rather than "ra-dish" -- although if that short vowel sound is a schwa, it's probably better the other way ("di-rect" rather than "dir-ect"). If I'm unsure, though, I just look in the dictionary, just as I did to double-check everything I just said.

― jaymc, Thursday, 17 May 2007 15:54 (nineteen years ago)

[i]Tracer's got it. IMHO.[/]

Yep. That's the one I used.

― Eyeball Kicks, Thursday, 17 May 2007 16:38 (nineteen years ago)

Haha, obviously I shouldn't be doing this kind of work today.

― Eyeball Kicks, Thursday, 17 May 2007 16:39 (nineteen years ago)

My mother taught me that it's 'different from'. But is it 'compared with' or 'compared to'?

Also, going back to the stupid statistics thing, am I being dumb for not understanding what people mean when they say "It increased by 120%"? If something's increasing, you take the existing 100% for granted, right? So in this case the increased figure would be 220% of the first one?

― Not the real Village People, Thursday, 17 May 2007 20:25 (nineteen years ago)

Better than, different from.

Yeah, I think people get confused about the percentage thing because when you actually DO the calculation you multiply X by 1.20 to get the 20% increase...but grammatically it's only 20% more, not 120% more.

― Laurel, Thursday, 17 May 2007 20:27 (nineteen years ago)

But is it 'compared with' or 'compared to'?

"Compared with" when it's comparing different things within the same class, e.g., "Toyota sales are up 30% in 2006, compared with last year's data" or "Compared with most message boards, ILX is fucking awesome." Whereas "compared to" is used for metaphors, such as "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

― jaymc, Thursday, 17 May 2007 20:38 (nineteen years ago)

fuck. i genuinely forgot all about different to/from. and now i'm not in work again till monday. someone bump the thread then and remind me, and i'll check to see what i can find :)

Line-end breaks. Talk me through them. US style = by syllable, British style = by etymology? Is that right?

nooooo! what jaymc says is equally applicable to the UK (although anyone who broke chick-en over a line would feel the pointy end of my pointy boot). i'm not going to go into more detail because i can't be fucking arsed, but basically: the syllable is king.

that said: if you can keep your stem on one line, eg bugger-ing as opposed to bug-gering, it's a lot easier to parse at a glance.

It increased by 120% etc

this is actually a really interesting point that makes me wonder if a lot of people actually don't have a clue what they really mean when they use this construction. i'm gonna take a back seat and watch this one pan out.

She had been day- (and night-) dreaming about Hank, her handsome flying doctor

i know this one's done and dusted, but FUCK ME. how does someone even start to write something as bad as that? another shout for the tracer OTMery.

― grimly fiendish, Thursday, 17 May 2007 21:59 (nineteen years ago)

I found this when I was googling "take a decision" (spit):
http://www.bbctraining.com/styleguideArticle.asp?articleID=20

It reminded me of some idiot who did a feature in 'Student Direct' (Manc student paper) calling a bunch of people "Pre-Madonnas".

― Not the real Village People, Thursday, 17 May 2007 22:16 (nineteen years ago)

If something increases by 100% it doubles. Right?

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 17 May 2007 22:35 (nineteen years ago)

that's exactly what i've always thought. so i'd have thought that 10 increasing by 120% would be 22 (ie itself plus 20%). but my calculator disagrees, as does the google calculator.

caveat: i got a U at A/S-level maths. i hate this shit.

― grimly fiendish, Thursday, 17 May 2007 22:39 (nineteen years ago)

grimly, increasing BY 120% is different FROM n*120%. I think.
Anyway this is something I've noticed a lot recently, although I've not seen anything as bad as "The survey found companies' paper costs had increased by an average of up to 7%" (upthread)

― Not the real Village People, Thursday, 17 May 2007 22:43 (nineteen years ago)

is there a thread on the actual business end of copywriting and the industry? i'd like to get into it, maybe even freelance but i don't really know where to get started.

― the next grozart, Thursday, 17 May 2007 22:51 (nineteen years ago)

If you have 100 apples and you increase the apples by 120, you have 220 apples.

But 120 apples is 120% of 100 apples.

Right?

― Madchen, Friday, 18 May 2007 11:33 (nineteen years ago)

Ronan's thread about good books for subs might help, Grozart, but I can't find it.

― Madchen, Friday, 18 May 2007 11:36 (nineteen years ago)

(xpost)Those are two different issues. If you have 100 apples, and 90% of them are green, then that means 0.9*100=90 of them are green. This isn't an increase, it's making a statement about what you've got. If you said "120% of my apples are green" this would imply 1.2*100=120 of them are green, but obviously this is nonsense.

If you increase your apples by 90% you have 1.9*100=190 apples (i.e. your 100 original apples plus 90 new ones). Similarly if you increase your apples by 120% you have 2.2*100=220 apples.

― Nasty, Brutish & Short, Friday, 18 May 2007 11:40 (nineteen years ago)

Yes it's the word "increase" that is causing the problems.

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 18 May 2007 11:41 (nineteen years ago)

yes, exactly. and although in the cold light of day i can see the difference between my two calculations (i was tired, and i'm also shit at sums) i am sure that an awful lot of people fuck this up in print. another one to watch out for.

― grimly fiendish, Friday, 18 May 2007 12:18 (nineteen years ago)

Sorry, maybe I wasn't being clear. What I meant was that an n% increase is not the same as increasing something by n%. So we agree (I think).

― Madchen, Friday, 18 May 2007 12:28 (nineteen years ago)

Wait it's not?? ...Augh. If you increase your profits by 100%, you've doubled them. If your profits see a 100% increase, then.. what?

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 18 May 2007 12:35 (nineteen years ago)

They are the same!

― ledge, Friday, 18 May 2007 12:43 (nineteen years ago)

Yes! But 2 is not 100% of 1. It's 200% of 1. Yes?

― Tracer Hand, Friday, 18 May 2007 12:44 (nineteen years ago)

Yes. 200% of 1 is 2. 1 increased by 100% is 2. 1 saw a 100% increase to 2. The last two mean the same thing, just with different phrasing.

― ledge, Friday, 18 May 2007 12:47 (nineteen years ago)

To add to the confusion,

percentage rises
probably our most common lapse into "mythematics": an increase from 3% to 5% is a 2 percentage point increase or a 2-point increase, not a 2% increase; any sentence saying "such and such rose or fell by x%" should be considered and checked carefully
http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184842,00.html

― Madchen, Friday, 18 May 2007 12:50 (nineteen years ago)

Hmm I guess technically they're right. "Interest rates rose by 2%" would mean a rise from 3% to 3.06%. I think most people would figure out what they meant though. Not that that's an excuse for sloppiness.

― ledge, Friday, 18 May 2007 12:55 (nineteen years ago)

If they wrote "Interest rates rose by 66%" you would hear the sound of fair trade coffee being splurted out all over the land.

― ledge, Friday, 18 May 2007 13:05 (nineteen years ago)

xpost: yes, i know all about this one. i had a fight with an arsehole who called herself a personal finance editor once about that very thing.

still think there's room for SPECTACULAR confusion about +100% increases.

― grimly fiendish, Friday, 18 May 2007 13:07 (nineteen years ago)

If they wrote "Interest rates rose by 66%" you would hear the sound of fair trade coffee being splurted out all over the land.

haha grimly you totally have to try that one time!

― CharlieNo4, Friday, 18 May 2007 13:19 (nineteen years ago)

I may not be able to do line-end breaks, but percentage increases are my bread and butter (as I sub for a bit of the economist).

We're really strict about whether we're talking about percentage point increases or percentage increases, and quite rightly so.

The media in general are very sloppy about this, and it has real-world effects. Didn't loads of people come off the pill because it increased the risk of getting cancer by 300% or something? But the difference was actually between a 0.01% chance and a 0.03% chance - I'm making up the figures but you get the point.

With rises of more than 100%, the detail is usually not so important, so I'd often just say "more than doubled" for a 120% rise.

― Jamie T Smith, Friday, 18 May 2007 14:37 (nineteen years ago)

Thinking about it, in my example, they weren't being sloppy, as the % increase was correct. However, it is just misleading to talk about percentage increases in things that can be expressed as percentages anyway, as you lose the sense of scale. There are two bits of information, the increase and the proportion of the whole in the first place, and you then only get one of them.

― Jamie T Smith, Friday, 18 May 2007 14:54 (nineteen years ago)

The phantom option Tracer is looking for is something like "profits are now at 200% of last year's levels" -- i.e., we made $2 instead of $1.

― nabisco, Friday, 18 May 2007 16:42 (nineteen years ago)

There's a key preposition involved in these, too -- increased by vs. increased to.

My $10 locker fee increased by 200% = $30.
My $10 locker fee increased to 200% (of previous fee) = $20.

― nabisco, Friday, 18 May 2007 16:46 (nineteen years ago)

Yeah, that's right. Again, in our house style the preposition is compulsory.

When I first started here I was always getting picked up on leaving out the "by".

― Jamie T Smith, Friday, 18 May 2007 16:57 (nineteen years ago)

One of my big annoyances has been popping up more and more often around here -- constructions like:

As a cable subscriber, we'd like to invite you to watch channel 64.

I think I understand the thought processes that lead to them, but they're SO irritating, and sometimes take a bit of work to straighten out in any elegant way.

― nabisco, Friday, 18 May 2007 17:57 (nineteen years ago)

Oh, I see those ALL the time. A misplaced something-or-other. Hate 'em.

― Laurel, Friday, 18 May 2007 17:58 (nineteen years ago)

xpost (Not that one, though, obviously: "As a cable subscriber, YOU are invited to watch channel 64. WE can't do stuff as a cable subscriber, because there's more than one of us, and we're the cable COMPANY, and anyway this isn't about us.")

― nabisco, Friday, 18 May 2007 18:00 (nineteen years ago)

lol at maths panic on this thread.

― Alba, Friday, 18 May 2007 19:26 (nineteen years ago)

xpost It's a misplaced (or dangling) modifier.

― jaymc, Friday, 18 May 2007 19:30 (nineteen years ago)

Should sentence starting with "Surely" end with a question mark?

― Alba, Saturday, 19 May 2007 11:29 (nineteen years ago)

not unless it's a question or you want to use a question mark

― RJG, Saturday, 19 May 2007 11:57 (nineteen years ago)

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