Re: Where to start?
From: Joe Peschel (jpeschel_at_no.spam.org)
Date: 02/16/04
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Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 04:53:52 -0000
"Arthur J. O'Dwyer" <ajo@nospam.andrew.cmu.edu> wrote in
news:Pine.LNX.4.58-035.0402151856550.12058@unix44.andrew.cmu.edu:
>
> On Sun, 15 Feb 2004, Joe Peschel wrote:
>>
>> Michael Amling <nospam@nospam.com> wrote...
>> > Joe Peschel wrote:
>> >> "Douglas A. Gwyn" <DAGwyn@null.net> wrote...
>> >>>Joe Peschel wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>>The usage has been changing? No, it hasn't -- at least not in
>> >>>>any well edited American periodical. What you've seen in the
>> >>>>computing community is likely the result of ignorance; technical
>> >>>>publications usually are poorly edited.
>
> [I don't find this to be the case. It's usually the non-technical
> publications -- local papers, Web pages, et al. -- that have the most
> mistakes. But that's irrelevant to anyone's point.]
I agree that small local papers and web pages have quite a few mistakes.
Take a look, however, at some of the "professional" cryptology papers
available on-line. Much of the writing, if not atrocious, is poor.
>
>> >>>No, it isn't ignorance. In fact I've had this discussion with
>> >>>very good tech writers.
>> >
>> > Douglas Gwyn is right. There's a niche of documentation where
>> > nothing
>> > extraneous should go between the quotation marks.
>>
>> I think that documentation might be better presented indented upon
>> the page.
>
> In some cases, you may be right.
Thank you. No one gave a specific example, so my suggestion isn't
appropriate in every case. It's far better to solve specific problems one
at a time.
> For example, were I to discuss the
> program fragment "if (x==42) { foobar(); } else { barfoo("quux"); }",
> it would be much less confusing to present the code as a block quote:
>
> if (x==42) { foobar(); } else { barfoo("quux"); }
>
Yes.
> This for two reasons, at least: firstly, because it solves the issue
> of what to do with literal quotes in the quoted material (the usual
> solution of alternating double and single quotes doesn't work for
> more than one level in plain text, and doesn't work at all for C
> code, in which ' and " mean different things); and secondly, because
> it makes plain where the quote begins and ends, without forcing the
> casual reader to scan back and forth for quote marks.
>
> [re: those who put commas outside of quotes]
>> >> Certainly, it is ignorance. Those you talked to are poor writers.
> <snip>
>
> This is not a valid conclusion from the evidence presented.
No one, so far, presented any evidence.
> How, pray tell,
Such diction! :-)
> is a technical writer supposed to discuss in ASCII text
> the different effects of the command-line options "-a", "-b", and "-,"
> on "myprog"?
> How is he to discuss the BF program ",-[+.,-]", or any
> other such example, without resorting to the common idiom of placing
> the quoted text in quotes and the un-quoted punctuation outside them?
An effective way to describe command-line options is to create a table
describing each option. No need for quotation marks at all.
>
> Now, this is a niche usage, as many people here have pointed out.
> But it is a usage whose niche is computer programming -- the subject
> of this newsgroup -- so you shouldn't be surprised to see it pop up
> here from time to time.
I know. It has popped up quite a bit, however, in Doug's prose lately.
>
> You'll never see a newspaper article intentionally contain
> sentences punctuated like this:
>
> Many teachers have never read "Hamlet", or Proust, or Dickinson.
>
> because that use of '"foo",' just looks really ugly in a proportional
> typeface. (I speak from experience.)
I know what you mean; I write for a living, too.
> It survives in plain-text
> media such as Usenet because it doesn't look half as awful in (e.g.)
> Courier font, and because while it's not ambiguous to write
> '"Hamlet,"', it can be ambiguous to write '"-a,"', as I avoided in my
> earlier example.
>
> Finally, one reason for the comma-outside-quote convention on Usenet
> is the prevalent use of pairs of special characters to simulate
> *boldface* or /italics/ in plain text. When a newspaper article
> references /Steppenwolf/, for example, it does not place the comma in
> italics (or, if it does underlining of book titles, it does not
> underline the comma).
I usually, but not always, try to use the hypertext code for italics when
referring on-line to book titles. In a manuscript, however, you designate
italics by a single underline. Newspapers often replace italics with
quotation marks.
> So Usenet idiom follows the same convention for
> // and **. Consistency then dictates that when using quotation marks
> to indicate special remove, rather than actual quotation (e.g., the
> way I write 'int' on Usenet), the comma is not placed inside "".
>
> And two final problems with Joe Peschel's suggested fix of placing
> all quoted material in block quotes: that would make it very difficult
> to discuss differences between the
>
> -a
>
> ,
>
> -b
>
> , and
>
> -,
>
> options to
>
> myprog
Again, just put information in a table.
>
> . Also, as you can see, it makes placement of commas still
> problematic. This is actually a problem currently in mathematical
> texts -- when we discuss a formula such as
>
> <big_complicated_formula>
>
> should we even bother with a comma? If we need a comma after
>
> <big_complicated_formula>,
>
> should it go inside the blockquote and risk confusing the reader,
> or should the comma go after the blockquote containing
>
> <big_complicated_formula>
>
> , and risk looking incredibly silly, sitting there by its lonesome
> at the beginning of the line? I know of no general solution to
> this problem, and my personal solution is usually to re-arrange the
> sentence appropriately, or else simply omit the comma as in the
> first of those three examples.
>
>
>> >>>The traditional usage is *illogical*, thus reasonably discarded
>> >>>when it starts to cause problems, as it did in some earlier
>> >>>computer documentation.
>
> [Now, with this assertion I disagree. Traditional usage is just
> as logical as the English language itself -- that is, not much, but
> it looks really nice. :-) ]
>
> -Arthur
>
I think most of your example problems can be solved be arranging the
information in tables. Thanks, however, for your concrete examples.
J
-- __________________________________________ When will Bush come to his senses? Joe Peschel D.O.E. SysWorks http://members.aol.com/jpeschel/index.htm __________________________________________
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