Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Matters of Style

I started working on the book again today. More precisely I started reading the manuscript from page one with a pencil in my hand. Re-reading helps me to catch a lot of wrong-word problems (like right instead of rite) and typos.

I'm home alone for the next few days and am really hoping to get to the end. Given my goal to finish I'm paying a lot more attention to sentence structure and punctuation. Thanks to early drills, lots of reinforcement throughout my school years and tons of practice, my writing tends to be grammatically correct.

That I continue to write the way I was taught back in high school sometimes causes problems. Different publications use different rules. Having written in multiple universes, there are a few areas that are particularly problematic.

Do you go the park with Wendy, John, and Mary? Or did you go with Wendy, John and Mary? In my opinion, the first version with the comma after John is technically more correct. Most editors, however, prefer the version without the comma. I have it both ways in my manuscript.

I often beg to differ with editors about the placement of punctuation in relation to quotation marks. With few exceptions, I place the punctuation after the quotation mark rather than before. She went to the store to buy a copy of "Lord of the Rings".

If the quotation was a complete sentence rather than a phrase, I'd include the punctuation inside the quotation marks. "She went to the store to buy a book." Most editors always want the punctuation inside the quotation marks.

If everyone did it my way the world would be a better place. That they don't is just another reason I remain...

The Crotchety Old Man

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