Travel, punctuation, etc.

I'm on a road trip this weekend, so for tonight, I've renewed an old post. (The original post is here, if you're the sort of person who likes to see what has been changed.)

This allows me to:

1. Point you to a cute, new Grammarly article that goes into further detail about the difference between et al. and etc.;
2. Have an excuse to remind you that hearth/myth Editorial Services are available to serve your editorial needs (click here for more info); and
3. Get out of writing a whole new post while avoiding yet another reuse of my On Vacation graphic. You're welcome.

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Not many indie authors use the abbreviations etc. and et al. -- but I do see them at work. Et al., particularly, is used in formal writing. But just so we're on the same page, punctuation-wise, I thought I'd explain a few things about them.

First, et al. means "and others." Et is the Latin word for "and." It's not an abbreviation. Okay? So it doesn't ever get a period after it. That would be like putting a period after "and" every time you use it in a sentence.

The al. part of et al. is, however, an abbreviation -- for alii (masculine plural), aliae (feminine plural), and/or alia (neuter plural). I'm not going to try to explain masculine/feminine/neuter nouns here; suffice it to say that Latin has 'em (as does Czech, by the way). As English speakers, all we really need to be concerned with is that al. is an abbreviation and et is not. So the proper way to punctuate the phrase is like so:

et al.

Clear so far? Excellent.

So now, clever thing that you are, you have recognized that the first two letters of etc. are the same as good old et that we just talked about. And you're correct. In Latin, etc. is short for et cetera, which means "and the rest" or "and other things."

"So how come," you are now going to ask me, "etc. gets slammed together into one word and et al. doesn't?"

Good question, and the answer is probably similar to how, in English, "has not" turned into hasn't and "I am" turned into I'm: etc. is a contraction. Typesetters, who liked to save a space anywhere they could, dropped the space in et c. at some point, and etc. eventually became common usage.

Got that? Et al. is a two-word abbreviation with no period after et; etc. is a one-word abbreviation that gets a period. Good. Okay.

Now. There's one more sticky thing about these two, and it comes up when you stick them in the middle of a sentence. They take commas on both sides. If you have a phrase like "the rain, the park, and other things make me very happy," and you want to replace and other things with etc. to save space, you need a comma both before and after etc. Like so:

The rain, the park, etc., make me very happy.

Don't be tempted to forget that second comma. Just like with a quote or some parenthetical material, you need to mark off the end of the Latin you've just inserted. Hence, the closing comma.

Okay? Cool. Here's your reward for suffering through this post. Have a great week, everyone.

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These moments of bloggy renewal have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Closing Pandora's box.

It's been quite a while since I wrote a punctuation-related post. Guess it's time.

NNBTK | deviantart.com

One of the most common punctuation mistakes I see is when an author wants to use punctuation to set off a phrase, but doesn't do it correctly. Here, let me show you want I mean. See if you can spot the errors in the following sentences:

I introduced my brother, Hal to the group.*

Frieda swears she's going to shave her head because her hair (which is naturally curly is so hard to manage.

The most annoying thing about punctuation mistakes -- the thing that makes my teeth itch the most is that they're so easily fixed.

In each case, the author has begun the job of setting off a parenthetical expression with some type of punctuation, but has not followed through and finished the job.

I get that sometimes people get going on their point and forget. Or in revision mode, they add something here and forget to adjust the sentence there. But sometimes I wonder whether people even realize they're making a mistake. Hence, this post.

I guess first we ought to define what this thing-that-ought-to-be-between-punctuation-marks is. If you can take the words in question out of the sentence and it's still grammatically correct, then what you have is a parenthetical expression or a parenthetical phrase. And yes, that's what it's called even if no parentheses are involved.

So for our examples above, if I take out the parenthetical material, the sentences would read like this:

I introduced my brother to the group.*

Frieda swears she's going to shave her head because her hair is so hard to manage.

The most annoying thing about punctuation mistakes is that they're so easily fixed.

See? The sentences work just fine this way. So if I go back and insert the words I've left out, I need to set them off on both sides with my punctuation of choice -- commas, parentheses, dashes, brackets, whatever -- so that my reader knows where the parenthetical material starts and ends.

When you put in the first punctuation mark and don't put in the second, it's a little like you've opened Pandora's box. You know that story, right? Zeus was mad at Pandora's husband, so He gave her a box (or actually, a jar) and told her not to open it. But of course her curiosity got the best of her. As it turned out, Zeus had stuffed the jar full of all the bad things in creation, and when Pandora opened it, they all escaped into the world. But the jar contained one more thing: hope. And when the bad stuff got out, it did, too.

So when you put in the first punctuation mark, you've opened the box. You need to remember to close that box when you get to the right place -- or else you run the risk of doing a bad thing: confusing your reader. Setting off that parenthetical material on both sides makes your sentence easier to understand. Which is all punctuation does, guys. Honest.

Anyway, I'm hopeful that you all will remember to close the box the next time you include parenthetical material in a sentence. (See what I did there?)


*A word about this sentence: I've set off the name with commas here (or intended to, anyway) because in this example, I'm assuming Hal is my only brother. So his name is superfluous to the meaning of the sentence; regardless whether I name him or not, I'm still talking about the same guy. However, if I had two brothers, I would omit the commas because the name is now critical to the meaning of the sentence. If I say, "I introduced my brother to the group," my reader won't know whether I mean Hal or Fred unless I say his name.

So:
Only one brother? "I introduced my brother, Hal, to the group."
Two or more brothers? "I introduced my brother Hal to the group."

Okay? Okay. Glad we've cleared that up.

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In the news: I was very pleased to learn that I've been named to a 2014 Honours List of Indie Authors in Australia. Thanks very much to Tabitha Ormiston-Smith for the hono(u)r!

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This moment of bloggy box-closing has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Et al., etc.: Why English is hard.

I wanted to let you know a couple of things before we get going here. First, today is the final day to enter the giveaway from the blog tour for Crosswind. Head on over to the Finishing Faeries website right now, before you forget, and enter the contest at the bottom of the page. Go on, click the link. I'll wait.

Back now? Cool. Because the other announcement is that the trailer for Undertow is live on YouTube, as of really late last night. Enjoy.

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Now on with this week's post.

One of the things that bugs me about getting older is finding out that a whole lot of my cherished rules of English grammar are nothing but style choices.

Nic McPhee, flickr.com

Take the rule about whether punctuation goes inside quotation marks or outside of them. Way back in grade school, I was taught that if the punctuation mark was a part of the quote, it went inside the quote marks; otherwise, it went outside.

This has always made sense to me. If something is an exact quote, then whatever's inside the quote marks ought not to have anything extraneous -- and if it does, then it ought to be clearly marked. So if you leave out a few words, you insert an ellipsis; if the quote didn't start with a capital letter and you're putting it at the front of your sentence, or if did but you aren't, then you put the letter that changed in brackets.

I've always treated periods and commas this way, too. If it was part of the original quotation, then I put the comma or period inside the quote marks. But if I'm just quoting a word or two and they happen to fall at the end of my sentence, then I would put the period outside the quotes.

Turns out that's UK style. The gods alone know how UK style got into 1960s-vintage textbooks in Michigan City, Indiana, in the good old U.S. of A., but there you have it.

The worst part is that I didn't realize I was "wrong" until an American friend ranted about it on her Facebook page awhile back. Fifty-odd years of writing, a fair bit of it professional, and only now am I discovering I'm wrong. (I'm trying to break myself of the habit, honest.)

But the truth is that English is a living language, and so stuff changes all the time. I suppose I should be grateful. It's just that sometimes it's hard to keep up.

So let's turn to a language that hasn't changed in thousands of years: Latin.

Not many indie authors use the abbreviations etc. and et al. -- but I do see them at work. Et al., particularly, is used in formal writing. But just so we're on the same page, punctuation-wise, I thought I'd explain a few things about them.

First, et al. means "and others." Et is the Latin word for "and." It's not an abbreviation. Okay? So it doesn't ever get a period after it. That would be like putting a period after "and" every time you use it in a sentence.

The al. part of et al. is, however, an abbreviation -- for alii (masculine plural), aliae (feminine plural), and/or alia (neuter plural). I'm not going to try to explain masculine/feminine/neuter nouns here; suffice it to say that Latin has 'em (as does Czech, by the way). As English speakers, all we really need to be concerned with is that al. is an abbreviation and et is not. So the proper way to punctuate the phrase is like so:

et al.

Clear so far? Okay.

So now, clever thing that you are, you have recognized that the first two letters of etc. are the same as good old et that we just talked about. And you're correct. In Latin, etc. is short for et cetera, which means "and the rest" or "and other things."

"So how come," you are now going to ask me, "etc. gets slammed together into one word and et al. doesn't?"

Good question, and the answer is probably similar to how, in English, "has not" turned into hasn't and "I am" turned into I'm. It's a contraction, sort of. Typesetters, who liked to save a space anywhere they could, dropped the space in et c. at some point, and etc. eventually became common usage.

Got that? Et al. is a two-word abbreviation with no period after et; etc. is a one-word abbreviation that gets a period. Good. Okay.

Now. There's one more sticky thing about these two, and it comes up when you stick them in the middle of a sentence. They take commas on both sides. If you have a phrase like "the rain, the park, and other things make me very happy," and you want to replace and other things with etc. to save space, you need a comma both before and after etc. Like so:

The rain, the park, etc., make me very happy.

Don't be tempted to forget that second comma. Just like with a quote or some parenthetical material, you need to mark off the end of the Latin you've just inserted. Hence, the closing comma.

Okay? Cool. Here's your reward for suffering through this post. As a bonus, it's approximately the same vintage as the textbook that taught me UK style. Have a great week, everyone.

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This very happy bloggy moment was brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.