My wife has taught writing-intensive courses to college students for over
thirty years. Progressively, over that time, she has seen less and less
punctuation and fewer hyphens, and now spends much of her time and effort
fighting to resurrect their use.
Conversely, in my recent (and first) experience with a university press
copy-editor, the revisions to my manuscript consisted primarily of having
much of my punctuation and virtually all of my hyphens stripped away.
One feels as beseiged from above as from below.
bj
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher C Jones" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2009 7:20 AM
Subject: Re: Inverted commas and such
Actually, there may be a reverse lesson in this for myself, in that I am
far too anxious about the quality of my writings. Sure, my current book
is not ready for a publisher to see but it really doesn't need that much
revision as to seem an overwhelming task. And I see a way forward for
the verse collection as well.
Not sure if this makes sense within the context but... ask me if need
be.
best, Chris Jones.
PS. Using Unicode (UTF8) may also play with punctuation in unintended
ways. I don't have the Microsoft character encoding.
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