Punctuation can get tricky especially when it comes to deciphering what the author intends to say and what strokes or dots need to be used to enhance the structure and meaning of a sentence. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss, we discover how even the slightest of punctuation slipups can turn fatal!
Commas are tiny, versatile, omnipotent commanders of the punctuation weaponry, helping us mortal editors who wage an everyday Kurukshetra against the evil of loss-of-meaning, the Incomprehensibility.
I confess – I learnt endashes and emdashes only after I became a copy editor. In my previous post, "I have wondered what difference will it make when a reader sees an en dash." For very long, I doubted if there is any reader – OK, when I say any, I meant any reader...
I have wondered what difference it will make when a reader sees an en dash. Will he think that it was some wrongly elongated hyphen, or will she make some educated guess? When I began as a copy editor, I hardly imagined that hyphens and en dashes are making the lives...
Sorry to be blunt, but that was the first question that came to my mind after reading this article in the Economic Times yesterday. I'm complaining not about the use - rather the misuse - of commas in the text, nor about the sloppy writing. I'm startled by the obvious...
If you are a copyeditor, I'm sure you know serial commas, aka Oxford comma. That's the comma that precedes the last element in series as in He loves reading, editing, teaching, and leading the team. Yes, that one that follows "teaching". You as well know that serial...