Hello Clark and Hans, You will not find consensus on the rightness of using a comma after “e.g.” The Chicago Manual of Style says yes (section 6.43), but the Oxford Manual of Style says no (3.8). Despite being solidly American, I would never put a comma after “e.g.” in the examples below.
But then, I never write “e.g.” At my company, we have a much simpler solution: never, ever use abbreviations for Latin phrases, because they are two translation steps removed from clarity. (Latin meaning to abbreviation to English meaning.) Instead, we spell out the plain old English words for the meaning we want to convey: and so on for etc., that is for i.e., for example or such as, depending on context, for e.g. So far, the extra few keystrokes have not given us repetitive stress injuries. There was a time when Latin was the lingua franca of the educated Western world. That time has passed and, for better or worse, English is now the lingua franca. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of arcasys Sent: Friday, September 21, 2012 12:45 PM To: xmleditor-support Subject: Re: [XXE] Spell checking and abbreviations (UNCLASSIFIED) Hi Clark, That's certainly true for English, and I was not aware of the possibility to put a comma after "e.g.". Unfortunately that will solve only part of my problem because I write my documentation in both English and German, and comma rules are very different in German (and more complicated and strict as in English, I'm afraid). We have a lot of "z.B." with no way to put a comma behind. Thanks anyway, Hans Am Freitag, den 21.09.2012, 11:49 -0400 schrieb Clark Karr: Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: NONE This is really a grammatical issue. In many cases, you should put a comma after "e.g.". For example, your sentence could be "In a sentence, e.g., this one, 'this' is reported ...". Another example: "The political parties are at it again; e.g., the conservatives say "bla bla bla" and the liberals say "Bla Bla Bla". Commas are "half stops" and indicate a slight pause when speaking. One way of checking for comma placement is to say the sentence out loud and notice where the slight pauses occur. A grammar book, whose title I've forgotten, suggests punctuation is the notation for how to "sing a sentence"; an interesting insight, I thought. You may also use a colon to introduce a list; e.g.: - a jug of wine, - a loaf of bread, and - thou. Clark -----Original Message----- From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of arcasys Sent: Friday, September 21, 2012 9:42 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [XXE] Spell checking and abbreviations The spell checker works very nice. However there's a tiny problem bugging me: In a sentence, e.g. like this one, the 'like' word would be reported as misspelled because it follows a full stop. Of course I can choose to ignore capitalising and only check this in a session once I'm done but is there another possibility to get rid of these marks? Thanks, Hans Kassensysteme Warenwirtschaft Vernetzung __________________________ Hans Artmann Flüggenstr. 10 80639 München Tel +49 89 17095721 Fax +49 89 17095722 Mob +49 151 17413090 www.arcasys.de<http://www.arcasys.de> Ust-Id: DE261339573 Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: NONE -- XMLmind XML Editor Support List [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://www.xmlmind.com/mailman/listinfo/xmleditor-support [cid:[email protected]] Kassensysteme Warenwirtschaft Vernetzung __________________________ Hans Artmann Flüggenstr. 10 80639 München Tel +49 89 17095721 Fax +49 89 17095722 Mob +49 151 17413090 www.arcasys.de<http://www.arcasys.de> Ust-Id: DE261339573
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