ATTN: Copyeditors and Grammar Fiends

yeah different style guides set different rules for when to write it out. some of them are less than 20 or less than 99, i don't get it.

less than 20 writing it out=maybe so someone won't confuse the letter "L" with the number "1"

i mean less than or equal to 100? i might just be making that up anyway! xpost

oh i thought it was just because there's no hyphen to deal with, like "nineteen" is there

oh that could be it too

I think I started a whole thread once about how the word "their" has fuzzed up numerical agreements to this point of helplessness. It's funny, though. I'm constantly noticing sentences like ... well, this is a simplified equivalent of what I'm looking at:

If you buy this insurance policy, any children you have, and their spouse or domestic partner, will be eligible ...

Except the real example is more complicated, to the point where if I say hey, that should be "spouses" and "partners," multiple children with their multiple "spouses/partners," they always say no, that makes it sound like one of your children is a polygamist and has multiple spouses.

And at this point it's not even like they're terribly wrong, because people will indeed read it that way, and really no agreement satisfies completely.

:(

(Well, except for putting "each child" or some singular re-write, but that's not really within our purview)

If you buy this policy and have children, they (and their spouses/domestic partners) will also be eligible...

But that both makes the change ("spouses/partners") and reframes the sentence

Bitch, you got kids? Lemme sell you this insurance policy and they get covered (wieves too).

I think the problem here is the insurance industry is disdainful of the English language.

But what's wrong with (and their partners)? The word spouse is unnecessary and encompassed by 'partner' and the plural agrees with children.

ha, the original isn't really insurance, exactly. or not from the insurance industry, anyway.

it's funny, though -- this thread is always full of great rewriting suggestions, but of course with technical/legal stuff you don't get a ton of re-writing leeway (especially if it's already gone past lawyers/technicians) ... in a lot of situations you're more limited to pointing out a firm "error" and the most basic remedy. (plus, the more complex your correction, the more it can make people just go "I don't get this, it's fine, just leave it like it is.") and it's not like I even do super-technical stuff!

xpost - I think there's a pretty clear and important legal distinction between "spouse" (i.e., you are married to them) and "domestic partner" (i.e., gay? no problem!)

Yeah, I get stuff rewritten by lawyers and it drives me insane because they have no care for the language whatsoever. The words are just little arguments in an equation that can be shuffled however as long as the answer comes out the way they want. Then I rewrite to make their writing more clear and they change other things.

I see what you're saying about making both spouses and partners plural but it still sounds more right to my ear than the original. The use of 'their' to mean 'his or her' feels so lazy to me. Rethink the phrasing!

Yeah, that was the other thread I was talking about -- how using "their" for "his or her" creates all these weird vortexes in terms of numerical agreements. (Also it may or may not necessitate the word "themself.")

There's one really funny one I used to deal with, but I can only describe it in generic terms. It had to do with a product relating to sexual health. There was a sentence that would always crop up that said, basically, "people who use this sexual-health product should talk to their partner about XYZ." And I would say, you know, that should be "partners," plural users with plural partners.

But they felt -- and this is valid -- that saying "their partners" put the reader in mind of a single product-user getting with multiple people. And on a branding level, they wanted you to think about the product in an, umm, monogamous context. So they'd say, "no, this makes it sound like our consumer is promiscuous."

Following which I would definitely NOT say "yeah, but what you currently have written ACTUALLY SAYS that all your customers are sleeping with the same person."

oops -- actually in that example it was "sexual partner(s)"

That is funny, especially since "their partner" actually makes me think of a single partner being shared by multiple people.

i like patricia o'connor on the singular-they problem:

Probably the grammar question of the century is "What can I use as a suitable gender-free pronoun?" The answer: There isn't one. And new pronouns are almost impossible to introduce into a language.

In 1858, a serious attempt was made to introduce "thon," a genderless third-person pronoun, into English, and it actually made it into dictionaries. You can still find it in 50-year-old editions. It went the way of "ne" (1850s), "heer" (1913), "ha" (pre-1936), and several other proposed epicene (i.e., genderless) pronouns.

http://www.homeruncards.com/imagesplayers/thon.jpg

As an occasional but fond user of "thon" as a still (just about) extant Scottish/Northern Irish variant of "yon", I don't know whether to be pleased or dismayed by this

On a scale of "pretty defensible" to "wrong as hell," where would you rate a sentence like this one:

Typically, most new computers will feature one or more USB ports.

(This is with regard to the "typically," which makes no sense to me -- either most computers have them or most don't. The "typically" seems to bring a whole other layer of probability into play, like it's saying that in 70% of possible universes, a majority of new computers have USB ports.)

not very defensible bc i hate when people fatten up their writing that way

lol I pad my writing all the time

yeah it makes me want to cross out half the words. it bothers me a lot more than plain old bad grammar and spelling!

my attitude towards writing: who cares

too bad my job is to write

As much as I know the "typically/most" is just a sloppy construction, I have trouble turning off the robotic grammar-parsing bit of my brain that does one of the following:

(a) says "oh, that's interesting, in what atypical circumstances do most new computers NOT have USB ports?"
(b) reads the sentence as dripping with disdain, as if the person is saying "most new computers -- and isn't this just so fucking typical -- have USB ports"

Sometimes people who care too much about grammar read things in ways that absolutely no one else does. I mean I'm just saying this apropos of nothing.

yeah to me it's like they're talking about a yearly survey of how many new computers have usb ports, and in almost all years most computers have them

xpost yeah well, it really helps people understand stuff even if they aren't conscious of it! though not in this case, i'd agree

side note, but yuck at "feature" as the verb there.

most computers have usb ports = 5 words instead of 11.

yeah the use of "will" in that context is annoying too. fire this person.

http://books.google.com/books?id=dZ7_o8ElbQoC&pg=PA91&lpg=PA91&dq=j.m.+coetzee+andre+breton+essay&source=bl&ots=M1NQ2KnBgQ&sig=NoIqyHlKQQg3WkoSGAibp07Fo0s&hl=en&ei=odQmS5XnNIuEswOi6cGpDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CA8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Well look, I think most people who care a lot about grammar are able to look at a sentence and see two separate levels of it: there's the thing you know the sentence wants to mean (and which 99% of readers will understand without much problem), and then there's the thing the sentence actually technically means, per the words used and the conventions of grammar and all that.

I.e., it's not like people who care about grammar are weird or blind to what the sentence wants to mean -- in most cases just about everybody gets what the sentence is trying to say -- but it can be irritating and/or funny when there's too big of a gap between what the sentence means and what it actually says, functionally, technically. Or at least I know that I personally don't get much interested by bad grammar/usage because it's "breaking a rule," I get interested when a sentence clearly wants to say "I bought a cat" but it's so ill-formed that it actually says "a cat bought me" or something. (Cf the sentence I was talking about last week where all users of the sexual-health product were having sex with the same woman.)

yeah bad grammar in conversation or on the internet doesn't bother me most of the time. because i use it too. but in some contexts it's like do you ever read english? this is your job?? you're a lawyer and you're gonna file this? bleh

i started like 3 posts in a row with "yeah"

4 if you count the xpost :)

lol @ nabisco's breakdown of "typically" - agree that it should be axed tho

OK, this isn't a question, but a pet peeve: I received this email today at work. The sender is a company vice-president with a 20-year career in our industry, which is in the corporate communications/public relations field. He also speaks three languages fluently. And yet I get an email like this, with the expectation that I am going to read, understand and respond to it without getting a migraine. (Product names redacted.)

Hi Phil...happy holidays to ya... while I know there will not be a drop down for xxxxxx... will you be using what I wrote for xxxxxx -- I feel so strong about it because it really helps clients and prospects understand what the best choices are for health-related stories -- and again it all depends on the nature of that story... health/biz news... or health-features or health-related public policy... I think we have an amazing story to tell...but it gets lost and there's a lot of health-related copy on xxxxx...a lot of it! because we don't tell it like it needs to be told...

I've been transcribing some interviews and this is something that's been coming up a bit - what is the correct way to punctuate multiple direct quotes ending in question marks in a single sentence? Like for example, if someone says, "He would ask things like, 'Why are we doing this?' and 'What is this about?' all the time." Having the question marks at mid-sentence seems wrong or I feel like there should be commas at the end of a quote if it's not the end of a sentence. Or am I just overthinking this?

I feel so strong about it

This is the inevitable outcome of having "I feel bad" and "I feel badly" both acceptable

I don't actually mind that email though.

Having the question marks at mid-sentence seems wrong or I feel like there should be commas at the end of a quote if it's not the end of a sentence.

Nah, the way you punctuated it looks fine to me.

yup, the way you've done it looks grand, so.

This is the inevitable outcome of having "I feel bad" and "I feel badly" both acceptable

What's amazing about this is that people who say "badly" tend to do it sort of pointedly, in the belief that it's the more correct version -- even though, with almost any other word, people know to use the adjective and would find the adverb ridiculous-sounding.

As far as tracing it back goes, I think a lot of this might stem from the fact that -- in terms of common how's-it-going questions -- the word "well" can be either an adjective or an adverb

can "monstrosity" be used in a neutral context?

i don't think so
i would choose another word unless there's some kind of context making it clear it's a good thing. but i can't imagine one, i think it's always a negative word.

At a stretch, one might conceivably use it neutrally to describe something which is distinguished mainly by monstrous size, but some negative connotations would no doubt accompany the word in any event.

"webevent" as one word, REALLY? (appears to be one of these trademark turned generic words)

we be ventin'

While I do consider myself a Grammar Fiend, I am a little bit confused over the usage of "its" and "it's".

possessive vs contraction, unless im forgetting more