(Emailed to Andrew Franklin of Profile Books, and posted to alt.usage.english.)
Dear Sir,
I opened all my Christmas presents on Christmas Eve, same as usual. As predicted, my brother had bought me the Christmas best-seller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss.
My first impressions, having read only the 34-page introductory chapter:
1. Shouldn't "Zero Tolerance" in the title bear a hyphen?
2. The next book should be titled (Witty phrase): TheZero-Tolerance Approach to Typography . This one looks as if it was set on MS Word.
3. "Why don't we use capital letters for all nouns any more?" (p.
22). Did we ever, in modern English? Not as far as I know.
4. "There is a rumour that in parts of the Civil > Serviceworkers have been pragmatically instructed to omit apostrophes..." (p. 27). If punctuation is supposed to aid clarity, wouldn't a comma after "Service" help, especially in view of the line break between "Civil" and "Service"?
5. " Eats, Shoots & Leaves is not a book about grammar. I'm nota grammarian" (p. 32). Should be a semicolon between the clauses, n'est ce pas ?
6. "A degree in English language is not a prerequisite for caringabout where a bracket is preferred to a dash" (p. 32). I have tried to think of such a case, and failed. I think she meant "parenthesis".
7. Yes, it is possible to over-use the word "meanwhile", thankyou!
8. Where am I supposed to place a book marked "Reference/Humour", according to the Dewey Decimal system?
Conclusion: I don't care if there are "issues"; this book does it for my kinky linguistic gene.
Simon R. Hughes
Dear Sir,
I opened all my Christmas presents on Christmas Eve, same as usual. As predicted, my brother had bought me the Christmas best-seller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss.
My first impressions, having read only the 34-page introductory chapter:
1. Shouldn't "Zero Tolerance" in the title bear a hyphen?
2. The next book should be titled (Witty phrase): TheZero-Tolerance Approach to Typography . This one looks as if it was set on MS Word.
3. "Why don't we use capital letters for all nouns any more?" (p.
22). Did we ever, in modern English? Not as far as I know.
4. "There is a rumour that in parts of the Civil > Serviceworkers have been pragmatically instructed to omit apostrophes..." (p. 27). If punctuation is supposed to aid clarity, wouldn't a comma after "Service" help, especially in view of the line break between "Civil" and "Service"?
5. " Eats, Shoots & Leaves is not a book about grammar. I'm nota grammarian" (p. 32). Should be a semicolon between the clauses, n'est ce pas ?
6. "A degree in English language is not a prerequisite for caringabout where a bracket is preferred to a dash" (p. 32). I have tried to think of such a case, and failed. I think she meant "parenthesis".
7. Yes, it is possible to over-use the word "meanwhile", thankyou!
8. Where am I supposed to place a book marked "Reference/Humour", according to the Dewey Decimal system?
Conclusion: I don't care if there are "issues"; this book does it for my kinky linguistic gene.
Simon R. Hughes
2. The next book should be titled (Witty phrase): The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Typography . This one looks as if it was set on MS Word.
Major quibble, Simon: It's not Word 's fault it's the morons without any training in typography, cursed with a tin eye, and lacking all sense for aesthetics who produce visual garbage and should not be allowed access to any typesetting or word-processing equipment.
Those cretins use "straight ticks" (" ') instead of "curly quotes" and genuine apostrophes, two hypens ( ) instead of en- and em-dashes, have no idea about leading, kerning, and margins, mix six typefaces on one page, typeset books in Times Roman or other unsuited faces, and commit other atrocities.
Even though I have typesetting programs, I use Word exclusively (the ancient 1992 version 5.1 yet!) to typeset all my books and other publications. Their visual beauty has been praised by famous book-designer Gershon Legman, designers at Princeton University Press, and others who recognize a beautifully designed and typeset book when they see one.
What, specifically, made you say, "This one looks as if it was set on MS Word"?
Reinhold (Rey) Aman
Maledicta Press typesetter
Thus spake Reinhold (Rey) Aman:
Add, perhaps, that they don't know how to use Word, if it's as good as you claim.
Not that I need to learn typesetting, but I have found satisfaction in TeX, which I am still learning, and which is free; I would be loath to pay out for anything else.
Two examples:
1. The wordspacing is uneven (a result of fully justified, largetype on small pages), giving the text uneven colour. Pages 29 and
32 are the worst examples I have found so far (I'd scan thepages, but I don't have a scanner for this computer, yet).
2. The margins are the same for all pages, the left margin beinggreater than the right, on verso as well as recto.
I'm sure a better-trained eye than mine would find more.
To be fair, even I know how to do better on MS Word; my judgement was a little rash, perhaps.
Simon R. Hughes
2. The next book should be titled (Witty phrase): ... one looks as if it was set on MS Word.
Major quibble, Simon: It's not Word 's fault it's the morons without any training in typography, cursed ... all sense for aesthetics who produce visual garbage and should not be allowed access to any typesetting or word-processing equipment.
Add, perhaps, that they don't know how to use Word, if it's as good as you claim.
Those cretins use "straight ticks" (" ') instead of "curly quotes" and genuine apostrophes, two hypens ( ) instead of en- ... Legman, designers at Princeton University Press, and others who recognize a beautifully designed and typeset book when they see one.
Not that I need to learn typesetting, but I have found satisfaction in TeX, which I am still learning, and which is free; I would be loath to pay out for anything else.
What, specifically, made you say, "This one looks as if it was set on MS Word"?
Two examples:
1. The wordspacing is uneven (a result of fully justified, largetype on small pages), giving the text uneven colour. Pages 29 and
32 are the worst examples I have found so far (I'd scan thepages, but I don't have a scanner for this computer, yet).
2. The margins are the same for all pages, the left margin beinggreater than the right, on verso as well as recto.
I'm sure a better-trained eye than mine would find more.
To be fair, even I know how to do better on MS Word; my judgement was a little rash, perhaps.
Simon R. Hughes
Teachers: We supply a list of EFL job vacancies
1. The wordspacing is uneven (a result of fully justified, large type on small pages)
At times justified text is hideously ugly. I don't understand why so many feel compelled to use it. And I'm no fan of Bill Gates, but you can't blame someone's decision to justify the text on MS Word.
giving the text uneven colour. Pages 29 and 32 are the worst examples I have found so far
Sounds like a problem with the printing process to me.
2. The margins are the same for all pages, the left margin being greater than the right, on verso as well as recto.
I'm not terribly familiar with Word, using it only for the most basic word processing, but I'd be shocked SHOCKED, I tell you if Word couldn't handle that situation you describe with a simple setting change.
I'm sure a better-trained eye than mine would find more. To be fair, even I know how to do better on MS Word; my judgement was a little rash, perhaps.
Agreed.
Dena Jo
Delete "delete.this.for.email" for email.
(Emailed to Andrew Franklin of Profile Books, and posted to alt.usage.english.) Dear Sir,
Conclusion: I don't care if there are "issues"; this book does it for my kinky linguistic gene.
I've been enjoying it as well is there anyone in this group who didn't get at least one copy for Christmas? but have spotted a few curious things.
One that particularly leapt out at me was her description of a cartoon she liked: it showed a group of people waiting to go into a building, standing by a sign which read Illiterate's Entrance .
She mentioned that she loved this cartoon, but being obsessive had Tippexed out the apostrophe and changed it to Illiterates' Entrance .
Was the Tippex thing supposed to be ironic, or do you think she really did miss the core of the joke?
Cheers, Harvey
Ottawa/Toronto/Edmonton for 30 years;
Southern England for the past 21 years.
(for e-mail, change harvey to whhvs)
On 25 Dec 2003, Simon R. Hughes wrote
I remember her as a TV critic and general columnist in the Times some years ago. She has a very sharp wit and sense of humour. I would guess she was conveying that she got the joke, understood that the misplaced apostrophe was an essential part of it but nevertheless couldn't bear to look at it. I didn't get a copy - I had browsed the thing in the shop and concluded that it wasn't really that funny and certainly wasn't original so I warned the family off.
John Dean
Oxford
De-frag to reply
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At times justified text is hideously ugly. I don't understand why so many feel compelled to use it.
Because it enables the reader to see the paragraphs easily, without needing extra leading (whitespace) between them.
Mark Brader "The design of the lowercase e in text faces Toronto produces strong feelings (or should do so)." (Email Removed) Walter Tracy
At times justified text is hideously ugly. I don't understand why so many feel compelled to use it.
Because it enables the reader to see the paragraphs easily, without needing extra leading (whitespace) between them.
I assume we're talking about "full justification" here. Paragraphs should always be separated by a little extra space anyway. Full justification doesn't improve readability one iota, and it can diminish it severely in relatively narrow columns.
Matti
Because it enables the reader to see the paragraphs easily, without needing extra leading (whitespace) between them.
I assume we're talking about "full justification" here. Paragraphs should always be separated by a little extra space anyway. Full justification doesn't improve readability one iota, and it can diminish it severely in relatively narrow columns.
Examples can be devised to show that white space isn't always enough to make paragraph separation easily evident. What's needed to do the job right is indentation of the first line of a paragraph.
Years ago in AUE, I was one of the very few people who regularly indented paragraph beginnings. Mark Israel was another.
I eventually succumbed to peer pressure and quit indenting, but Mark continued to indent for a long time. Recent postings from him at alt.education.distance have indented paragraphs. However, the latest posting I find from him at Dejagoogle has no indentation (Message-ID:
(Email Removed)).
For what it's worth, I find it interesting to read in that posting that Mark has moved from Massachusetts back to California.
As for justification, a good place to compare the effects on readability and reading pleasure of right justification versus ragged-right format is one of Leon Uris's books. He uses one or the other depending upon whether the viewpoint of a chapter is first-person or omniscient-observer. (I think the book is Trinity , but it has been a decade or three since I read it.)
By the way, note the improved clarity achieved by the above use of hyphens in "first-person" and "omniscient-observer" even though they're not used attributively.
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