• chunes@lemmy.worldOP
    4·
    2 months ago

    Some of mine in no particular order:

    • Comma splices.
    • Using apostrophes to make abbreviations plural. It’s UFOs, not UFO’s. This goes for decades, too. It’s 1920s, not 1920’s.
    • Putting punctuation in the wrong place when parentheticals are involved (like this.) (Or like this).
    • Same for quotations. Programmers in particular seem averse to putting punctuation on the inside where it usually belongs.
    • Mixing up insure, ensure, and assure.
    • Using ‘that’ where ‘who’ is more appropriate. For example, “People that don’t use their blinkers are annoying.”
    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Programmers in particular seem averse to putting punctuation on the inside where it usually belongs.

      Some of us need to write technical documents where the punctuation is not clearly a metacharacter.

      I’ve intentionally stuck punctuation outside quotes for decades.

      https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/logical_quotation

      Logical quotation is similar to but stricter than the common British style of quotation which is based on the sense of the punctuation in the context of the writing in which the quotation is being used (which permits limited insertions of additional punctuation, or alteration of original punctuation, in the quoted content, which logical quotation does not). Some sources (chiefly American) conflate the two terms and styles (e.g., Yagoda 2011).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_marks_in_English

      The purpose of language is to convey meaning. Logical quoting is more effective at doing so.