What are your grammar bugbears?
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I see where you're coming from. In school we were also taught to NOT put a comma before 'and' if it's a list. I also didn't quite get it, and found it weird. However, if you consider 'and' and a comma serving the same purpose (linking the elements in a list), then putting a comma before 'and' would just make either of them redundant. I'm not saying I prefer either of the two, but at least there is a reason to it.
The issue comes in when you consider there are times you'd want to group things. Example:
I would like a toolbox with 4 drawers: Nuts and bolts, screws, washers and chisels.
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You do something ON purpose or BY accident, you don't do anything ON accident!
“On the weekend”. I think that fits too.
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“Then” when it should be “than”.
People starting sentences with “I mean”, and no prior context.
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“On the weekend”. I think that fits too.
Eh, you can have things you need to do on the weekend, but you can also have things you need to do by the weekend.
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Eh, you can have things you need to do on the weekend, but you can also have things you need to do by the weekend.
Quite happy to be wrong but my original point was it’s grammatically incorrect. I think so anyway.
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When people formulate questions as statements, because it throws me out of my reading flow ha ing to correct my inner voice.
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I'm sorry, but, without commas, this is just a mess, and I'm not going to torture myself into reading it.
Your comment, takes 5 minutes to read with that many commas
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None. Prescriptivism isn't how the world actually works.
I do wonder what the second "is" in "the thing is, is that" means. Presumably, there's a logical answer for the speakers.
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The issue comes in when you consider there are times you'd want to group things. Example:
I would like a toolbox with 4 drawers: Nuts and bolts, screws, washers and chisels.
Oh, if anything, unless it's in the last element, it's easier to see paired items in the list ( ',' -> next element; ' and ' -> still the same element, with 'and' inside). When it's the last element, it's indeed ambiguous. And then there's /u/hakase 's comment:
“They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook”, where Betty is the maid mentioned.
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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."
wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
