Matthew Phelan

Today is National Punctuation Day!! What punctuation mark(s) trip(s) you up the most? Share in the comments. And in honor of National Punctuation Day, I'm resharing a blog post I wrote about commas. [Blog post is originally from April 2019.] #punctuation #nationalpunctuationday #grammar #grammarnerd #writingcommunity #punctuationmatters

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Editing pet peeve: the goofy obsession with the Oxford comma. Oxford enthusiasts—whom I often refer to as "Oxfordnistas"—insist that the serial comma is the ultimate arbiter of clarity and slayer of ambiguity. And they demonstrate this overstated power through a series of reductionist—albeit humorous—memes. Below on the left is one such example. Again, this meme assuredly suggests a moment where a lack of a serial comma may confuse readers. Rather than express a list of the three, the Oxford-less sentence seems to imply an appositive suggesting the exotic dancers are, in fact, Stalin and JFK. But what happens if you change strippers (plural) to stripper (singular). One good contrived strawman argument deserves another, right? On the right is the counterpoint. Here, the sentence with the Oxford comma introduces ambiguity. Is that JFK on stage three collecting singles, or is somebody else? The trick is simple: When in doubt, rewrite. "We invited JFK, Stalin and the strippers." See how this is clearly a list of three? See how I didn't need the comma to do so? Ultimately, the Oxford comma is a stylistic convention, so it is a matter of personal preference. You can also write, "We invited JFK, Stalin, and the strippers." That *also* works. Either way, stop pretending that your prescriptivist take on the Oxford comma is holy writ. #Oxfordcomma

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Joseph Brodsky in his work “Dall’esilio” mentions that the reader of a literary work is doomed to an interpretative role… Thus, we as critical readers are “convicted” to make a textual interpretation of the short story “Rip Van Winkle”, written by American author Washington Irving. The present essay investigates the symbolic analysis of the text, as well as the analysis of the protagonist Rip Van Winkle as an archetypal character of Homer’s Odyssey. These are the two outlines on which our essay is constructed, from which we will discover and analyze other topics such as the mixture of cultures or the need to create an American myth. At this point, we will treat the myth as a sign of the birth of a culture. According to our interpretation, the myth of the American Odyssey will signify the birth of the American Myth. Thus, Washington Irving creates the character of Rip Van Winkle out of the need to formulate/create an American Culture of its kind. You can read the article here: https://lnkd.in/daGK6H8U

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👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼to #NaNoWriMo for all they do to encourage writers of diverse skills sets and abilities in their writing journey, including this (controversial to some) acknowledgment of how some use AI tools. Write on! “AI is a large umbrella technology and that the size and complexity of that category (which includes both non-generative and generative AI, among other uses) contributes to our belief that it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.“ https://lnkd.in/dkMQmgCV

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I just caught a typo in New Hart's Rules! No one is perfect, and manuscripts are rarely completely error-free. But it is reassuring when we manage to spot errors in texts that have been thoroughly edited and which are used by millions of editors arround the world. In fact, it feels a bit like finding an Easter egg. NHR is the main style manual for texts in British English, and it's used not only in the UK but in other countries as well. Editors who have worked through the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) courses know this text backwards! I forget the exact stats, but I know that even the biggest publishing houses do not expect 100% of errors to be caught. The best way to catch as many errors as possible is to have multiple sets of eyes on the manuscript by doing multiple rounds of editing. Proofreading especially should be done by someone who's never seen the text before. So I've caught this error. But I know it's not the only one in there. What have you found? PS - I left a typo in this post because it proves the point! #AmEditing #UKEnglish #Style

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https://lnkd.in/ePu9xApd As this discussion of the positive aspects of criticism makes clear, how you view and act on the feedback matters. Reviewer & editorial criticism that seemed negative when it arrived from a journal or acquisitions editor may in fact turn out very different.

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