Something I'm noticing more and more, even amongst experienced writers – a complete lack of understanding in regard to the use of an apostrophe for contractions and possessives. Particularly in the case of its and it's. It's not difficult, people: "its" is the possessive form, "it's" is the contraction of "it is".
He also does away with quotation marks, which strikes me as simply an attempt to be cute. But there are a few others who do so as well.
Showing you anything so you can discount it if it doesn't agree with you is fruitless. And based on the discussion so far, I can see that's precisely what you'd do with anything that doesn't support your point of view. And your decision that a rule has to be 18th century or earlier to be 'old' is completely arbitrary and foolish. Your point was a poor one, as has been demonstrated, and all you have left are generalizations and arbitrary dates for sources that will satisfy you. Congratulations.
James Joyce was doing that nearly 100 years ago, and some others at the time jumped on his rather small bandwagon. I wouldn't call it "cute" these days, because the precedent is so old. But it might be self-consciously literary.
If an action if self-conscious (in this context) then it's affected. It it's affected, then it's pretentious. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing (some of my favourite authors are pretentious and I'd be an idiot to argue that they're not), but I think it's important that we call a spade a spade.
I agree about the spade-calling, but I don't agree that if it's affected, then it's pretentious. My Concise Oxford defines "pretentious" as "attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed." If the work has importance or merit commensurate with what is affected, then it isn't pretentious. Yes, I split hairs with the finest of razors. But my more serious point is that there are times when, if one is in the presence of a really good or great work, cynicism is unwarranted.
Crikey. They came for the adverbial dialogue tags beacuse a deft writer has no need of them. They came for the dialogue tags because the clever writer renders them otiose. They came for the quotation marks because the good writer distiguishes dialogue from prose with evident shifts in tone, syntax and intent. Etc etc Might be said to subtly undermine the privileged position of the narrator - reducing him to a mere player.....or exalt the characters to narrators. A delightful device. Not enough used.
Wow, all this time and no one has mentioned my two pet peeves: 1) When sports journalists refer to a match that is currently tied as "deadlocked". A deadlock is a tie that cannot be broken. 2) "Comprised of" (As in "His collection was comprised of..."). As Fowler's English Usage points out, the verb "comprise" has no passive voice. Those insisting on using the passive voice in such a context should use "composed of". Somehow, the idea has gotten about that "comprised of" sounds smarter. Or something. It also irks me no end when college-educated people, having had their grammatical felonies pointed out to them, respond, "Well, I wasn't an English major." I'm always tempted to respond, "It doesn't sound like you were educated at all." Of course, I don't.
Well, quite. If they were an English major they'd deny that their supposed grammatical felonies were any such thing, and point out that they're actually Bakhtinian centrifugal tendencies. (Yes, I did major in English ).
You know, I wasn't aware of this one. Thank you for pointing it out. Any day I learn something new is a good day (and most days are very good).
Okay here are some more pet peeves: I hate reduncancies: i.e. "9 a.m. in the morning" (it can be 9 a.m. at night? really?), ATM machine (when the M stands for machine, so it's like saying "machine" twice), etc. As a journalist I'm forced to be super picky about these things, so it annoys me to death to see them, especially when I'm reading news articles and a reporter does it. Also, it really annoys me when people don't indent for new paragraphs/dialogue or space between paragraphs, so their entire prose is one huge block. It makes it extremely difficult to review. Also, when people put the apostrophe before the s instead of outside the s when dealing with plural possessives: "He went to his parent's house," "The girl's room" (if it's more than 1 girl sharing a room) etc.
What about Dunno? I find myself using that word thing alot online. But thats mostly because I would probably actually say it. lol
"Dunno" is a conventional phonetic rendering. If it appears in literal dialogue, it's probably okay. If it's in character-driven narration (narration in a character's voice), that can work too. Other than that, I'd avoid it.
Out of interest, how would you write the electromotive force supplied to houses? Is it 230 volts AC (110 volts AC in some places) or is it 230 AV? The Institution of Electrical Engineers in the UK has suffered agonies over that question, although the general consensus seems to be that redundancy (or is it contradiction?) is better than confusion.
Tried to look that up for you in the AP Stylebook, couldn't find it...also you're in the UK and I'm in the U.S. so it's probably not the same for me anyway...and journalism is different from engineering and it's probably best to steer away from confusion...sorry I can't be more helpful! (I know nothing about electrical engineering).
I worked at a college and was amazed at the lack of grammar and english skills of the incoming Freshmen. We had 4 remedial English courses. Many public High Schools do a poor job preparing students for college writing. Believe me the Computer Science majors made very little effort to improve their writing skills beyond what they needed to get past the required coursework. I'm by no means perfect but if you think that's bad try a technology forum. The use of even the most basic grammar is barely observed. There/their and your/you're are the most frequent and obvious misused words. To point them out will start an argument. I've learned to ignore them. Cheers,
I must give special mentions to grocery stores and markets for their persistence in this respect. Apple's and orange's anyone? We also have a wide selection of cheese's.
Something that comes up a lot here is they get mad at the person, half the time you should be mad at schools\parents or whatever I was one of the smartest in my schools all the time, but even i did not know most of these things Not to say it's always the schools fault but still my biggest pet peeve is when someone corrects you and makes a mistake doing it
I'd ask the editor lol...sorry! Wolfi - I get what you mean: earlier on in the thread Cogito referred to them as "grocer's apostrophes." I see "$'s" all the time. Because the dollar sign totally owns the apple...
