On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 10:34 AM, Sean Whitton <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 10 2017, Paul Hardy wrote: > >> 1) There are instances where "i.e." and "e.g." have commas after them, >> and instances where they do not. If you have a preference for one >> over the other, I can mark the document so it is consistent. If >> nobody has a preference, I will just put commas after each occurrence. > > There is no reason to make it consistent. In some circumstances a comma > is appropriate, and in others it is not.
By "they do not," I meant that there was only a space after them versus some alternate punctuation. I realize now that was ambiguous. I was just going to post patches, but maybe I should explain things first. I was educated by some pretty old-fashioned American English teachers when I was a kid, but I have moved away from a lot of what they taught me. I wouldn't recommend any change to make a document sound more stodgy or anachronistic. Still, I do not think it has become correct to just have a space after "i.e." or "e.g." (although I was going to ignore that prejudice if it were applied consistently throughout the document). Here is what the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed., says about this: 5.62 That Is, Namely, and Similar Expressions A comma is usually used after such expressions as that is, namely, i.e., and e.g. The punctuation preceding such expressions should be determined by the magnitude of the break in continuity. If the break is minor, a comma should be used. If the break is greater than that signaled by a comma, a semicolon or an em dash may be used, or the expression and the element it introduces may be enclosed in parentheses... Now, that edition is almost a quarter of a century old at this point. Maybe there is an emerging convention to use nothing after "i.e." and "e.g." that I don't know about. I was also going to edit comma splices. Here's a somewhat humorous explanation on comma splices from the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A ( http://chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Punctuation/faq0090.html ): Q. What is the correct way to punctuate the following sentence: “Let’s face it, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.” Is it correct to use the comma even though “Let’s face it” is an independent clause? A. Your sentence is an example of a comma splice. Some readers will be distracted by it; some will consider it incorrect; a few will take it as one more sign that civilization is coming to an end. However, as Bryan Garner writes in Garner's Modern American Usage: “Most usage authorities accept comma splices when (1) the clauses are short and closely related, (2) there is no danger of a miscue, and (3) the context is informal.” That said, a dash or colon in place of the comma in your sentence would be uncontroversial. Incidentally, the Chicago Manual of Style always puts "i.e." and "e.g." in italics, because they are of foreign origin. That's what I was taught when I was a kid, but I planned on just leaving them plain text (which is becoming more and more common). The Chicago Manual of Style is an academic text; I had to use it in grad school. I'm sure that I only know a small fraction of what it contains. A more approachable book, written in a conversational style full of humorous anecdotes, is Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by British author Lynne Truss. Here's an example from her book that mentions comma splices: "...I have seen an essay on the internet seriously accusing John Updike, that wicked man, of bending the rules of the comma to his own ends 'with fragments, comma splices, coordinate clauses without commas, ellipted coordinate clauses with commas, _and more_' -- charges to which, of course, those of us with no idea what an ellipted-coordinate-clause-with-a-comma might look like can only comment, 'Tsk'." Most of what I was going to submit were obvious typos. I'll wait on submitting a bug report with proposed patches for the Developer's Reference. I will not have access to computers next weekend so it will have to wait until after that. All the best, Paul Hardy
