Punctuation placement is important. It's the difference between this being a certain brand of pancake syrup and...boy syrup. I really don't want to know what boy syrup is.
I never learned how to use a semi-colon(;) in school. I still don't know how to use one now. It is time for me to just admit that I probably won't ever need to know how to use one.
This week, I was a guest for the second time on the delightful "Baseball by Design" podcast to talk about the dash in the name of the team called the Winston-Salem Dash. Should it be a hyphen? Inquiring minds want to know. ;)
I don't care what the elites say, I think that items in quotation marks that aren't indicating speech by another person should have the punctuation outside the quotes.
Take this for "example".
This is a petty hill I will die on. Suck it, linguistic cabal.
"The comma neatly separates a list of things that are completely entangled, and in the process obscures the degree of violence happening to each individual person."
See the red circle in Figure 1. Friends, that thing is not an apostrophe! It’s a left single quotation mark. Please don’t get caught making this egregious punctuation error. Yeah, yeah, people insist on using the not-really-very-smart quote mechanisms in apps like MS Word. If you use “smart quotes”, please post-process documents to fix these, instead of letting them leak into the wild, much to the embarrassment of your groovy company. #punctuation#MSWord#dumbquotes#typography
OK, despite what the style guides say about putting spaces around #ellipses, I’m going to revert back to the unspaced version in all cases except elision, because I just don’t like how the spaced versions look then.
There are three kinds of ellipses: Three period characters separated by (no-break) spaces: . . . [Chicago], three period characters with no intervening spaces: … [AP], and the Unicode #ellipsis: …, which I think can always be a stand-in for the AP style.
To me, placing spaces before and after ellipses only make sense for elision. in the Chicago style: “The fox jumped . . . lazy fox”, and the AP style: “The fox jumped … lazy fox”. To my eyes, the spaces clearly indicate missing words or sentences.
For pauses and trailing speech, I think adding a space makes things look really weird: “I … uh … I mean …” and “Launching in 10 … 9 … 8 …”. For those use cases I like to eliminate the leading space, e.g. “I… uh… I mean…” and “10… 9… 8…”. They just look better to me.