Editor's Corner

Happy Friday, everyone. Today’s Editor’s Corner topic is second person point of view.

A lot of business and professional writing—particularly instructions and correspondence—would be much clearer if it were written in a second person (using you, your, and yours). Look at these two sentences:

· You must install the program on each PC.

· The program must be installed on each PC.

The first sentence leaves no doubt about who needs to perform the installation.

Many people avoid writing in second person because they think it sounds too casual. On the contrary, professional and technical writing experts often prefer second person because it creates sentences that are easier to understand and directions that are easier to follow.

There is one caveat: if you don’t know who will be performing the action, the second sentence is acceptable.

So, don’t shy away from using you, your, and yours in your professional documentation and correspondence. The experts agree, it makes your writing clearer.

This isn’t my dog, but I hope it makes you smile:

Donna Bradley Burcher | Senior Technical Editor | Symitar®

8985 Balboa Ave. | San Diego, CA 92123 | Ph. 619.278.0432 | Ext: 765432

A subscriber asked, “Can you use a question mark and exclamation point together at the end of a sentence?”

The use of these two specific punctuation marks is referred to as the interrobang, which combines a question mark and an exclamation point, and looks like this:

Since the interrobang isn’t a standard punctuation mark and isn’t on most keyboards, you may have seen double punctuation used at the end of a sentence (?! or !?).

I read an article that states that advertising executive, Martin K. Speckter, created the interrobang in the 1960s because “he lacked a punctuation mark suitable to express excitement and disbelief simultaneously.” Some typewriter companies also added an interrobang key. However, like most 80s hair bands, the luster of the interrobang fizzled out.

As for the etymology of interrobang, interro comes from interrogation point, which is the technical name for the question mark, and bang is printers’ slang for the exclamation point.

In formal writing, avoid using double punctuation marks at the end of a sentence. Instead, figure out what you mean to say and then choose the appropriate punctuation mark to express your thought.

Here’s a response to a question about the interrobang in the Chicago Manual of Style Q&A column.

Q. I checked throughout CMOS and find not a single mention of the interrobang. How could there not even be a single mention of such an intriguing punctuation option?!

A. And we don’t mention smiley faces, either! But some of us are keeping a list for the next edition.

Jackie Solano | Technical Editor | Symitar®

8985 Balboa Ave. | San Diego, CA 92123 | Ph. 619.542.6711 | Extension: 766711

Symitar Documentation Services

Please excuse the length of this Editor’s Corner email. We try to keep them short, but this one requires examples and a little more explanation. I hope you find it helpful! Here goes…

Problems occur in sentences that end in a pronoun (I, me, him, she etc.) when the pronoun is preceded by the words than or as. I’ll show you what I mean. Look at the following sentences that contain the word than followed by the pronoun I or me. You’ll see that the sentences are a little ambiguous.

· She likes ice cream a lot more than me.

· She likes ice cream a lot more than I.

Is only one sentence incorrect? Do they mean the same thing? The answer to both questions is no. People may use the pronouns interchangeably, but when you break down the sentences, they have different meanings. To make the sentences clear, I’ll add words that show the meaning attached to each pronoun. When I include these words, the meaning of each sentence becomes clear:

· She likes ice cream a lot more than (she likes) me.

· She likes ice cream a lot more than I (like ice cream).

With the missing words included, you see that the original sentences have vastly different meanings. We omit these words from English sentences all the time. It’s not incorrect, but we need to be aware of how specific pronouns change the meaning. Using the correct pronoun makes your writing clear and concise.

The pronoun as can cause a similar kind of confusion. Look at these sentences:

· My sister loves craft beer as much as me.

· My sister loves craft beer as much as I.

I’ll ask the same questions: Is only one of these sentences correct and do both sentences mean the same thing? Let’s look again at the first one with the omitted words included:

· My sister loves craft beer as much as (she loves) me.

The sentence now clearly states that my sister loves craft beer and me equally. That’s very insulting and quite possibly true.

So let’s look at the other example with the omitted word included so that you can easily work out the meaning.

· My sister loves craft beer as much as I (do).

This sentence means that my sister and I love craft beer equally. It also means that my sister has dodged a bullet, because after all I’ve done for her…

Here’s a tip: when I’m not sure whether to end a sentence with I or me, I determine whether I can repeat the phrase that begins with the verb. For example, “She likes ice cream more than I like ice cream,” If I can repeat the phrase, the correct pronoun is I. You wouldn’t say “She likes ice cream more than me like ice cream”—unless you’re Tarzan.

Donna Bradley Burcher | Senior Technical Editor | Symitar®

8985 Balboa Ave. | San Diego, CA 92123 | Ph. 619.278.0432 | Extension: 765432

Symitar Technical Publications Writing and Editing Requests

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Today’s topic comes from one of our readers who was, I think, watching Schindler’s List, and heard the term “skirt” being used to refer to a woman. He then mentioned “skirting the law.” Although references to women and avoiding the law seem unrelated, the various meanings of the word skirt, whether used as a noun or a verb, are actually closely connected.

According to Merriam-Webster, skirt used as a noun is all of these things:

· the part of an outer garment or undergarment extending from the waist down that has a free hanging lower edge and is cut in one with the upper part of the garment or attached at the waistline

· either of two usually leather flaps on a saddle covering the bars on which the stirrups are hung

· a cloth facing hanging loosely and usually in folds or pleats from the bottom edge or across the front of a piece of furniture

· the outer part of a parachute canopy

· the lower branches of a tree when near the ground

· the rim, periphery, or environs of an area, territorial division, or natural feature

· part or attachment serving as a rim, border, edging, or endpiece of an object: such as:

o the lip of a bell

o an apron piece or border in a building (such as a baseboard or the molded piece under a window stool)

o a decorative piece on furniture connecting the legs along the lower edge of the table top, chair seat, or base

o a protective guard or plating on machinery and appliances

o a sheet metal covering for the wheels and other working parts of a locomotive

o the bottom portion of the vertical wall of a screw-on jar cap

· the final portions of a period of time

· the diaphragm or midriff of an animal used as edible meat

· British: a flank of beef

· slang: girl, woman [KC – Derogatory term that may lead to fisticuffs!]

· the bearing surface of a piston consisting of the plain cylindrical portion below the ring

· Fabric, fleece

Most of these things have a similar shape or the function of surrounding something, sort of like the items below.

Skirt

Bed skirt

Tree skirt

The outskirts of an area

As far as the verb skirt goes, here are a few more definitions from M-W:

· to form the border or edge of : run along the edge of : border

· to go or proceed closely around or about : follow the outskirts of

· to remove the skirtings from a fleece of wool [KC-Trimming the edge.]

· to be, lie, or move along an edge, border, or margin : follow a roundabout path

· of a hound : to cut corners rather than follow the actual path of a fox

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

Good morning, and welcome to a brand new week!

An interested reader asked me about single quotation marks (‘/’). He noticed that people seem to use them for the same purpose as double quotation marks (“/”) and asked me if they were interchangeable.

Maybe some of you have the same question, and I am ready to give you a definitive answer: No!

Single quotation marks and double quotation marks serve unique purposes.

Double quotation marks are more common; we use them for the following reasons:

· For direct quotations

· For the titles of short stories, short poems, titles of articles, essays, chapters of books, songs, and episodes of TV shows or radio programs

· To highlight technical terms, slang, or other expressions that are not considered normal usage (note: in cases like these, quotation marks are often overused and can be distracting—so be careful)

· To draw attention to a word or phrase to point out that it is inaccurate or absurd (scare quotes)

Single quotation marks, on the other hand, have one main purpose: they are used when you have a quotation within a quotation. Here’s an example:

“The man yelled, ‘Get out of my way!’ and then he pushed past me, and I fell down the stairs,” Janet explained to the hotel manager.

The previous example is a statement that Janet gives to the hotel manager, and she is also quoting something someone else said (Get out of my way!). That gives you a quotation inside a quotation.

Now, earlier, I said that single quotations have one main purpose. There are several other occupation-specific reasons for using single quotation marks, but they don’t really pertain to most of us:

· The Associated Press (AP) uses them In headlines

· Certain disciplines (philosophy, linguistics, theology) use them to highlight words with special meaning

Since most of us don’t follow the AP Style Guide and we rarely write about philosophy, linguistics, or theology in our documentation, your take-away today is this: unless you’re providing a quote within a quote, you will typically use double quotation marks.

Enjoy your day!

Donna Bradley Burcher | Senior Technical Editor | Symitar®

8985 Balboa Ave. | San Diego, CA 92123 | Ph. 619.278.0432 | Extension: 765432

Symitar Technical Publications Writing and Editing Requests

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Good day to you!

Today’s offerings are from a Daily Writing Tips article that I received a couple of weeks ago. Some of you may find it odd, but I found it fascinating in this high-tech world we live in, that we have so many compound words (65!) that end in “stone.” Rather than throw them at you all at once, I’m going to skip these rocks gently to you over two days.

Dozens of compound words, all but a few closed, end with the word stone, though some of the terms have figurative senses stemming from the original meaning and a few do not refer to actual types of rock at all. Here’s a list of most if not all compound words in which stone is the second element, with accompanying definitions.

1. birthstone: a gem symbolically associated with the month of one’s birth

2. bloodstone: a type of quartz with red spots that resemble drops of blood

3. bluestone: a bluish stone used in building

4. bondstone: a stone whose length is equal to the thickness of a wall that is placed in the wall to help strengthen it

5. brimstone: a traditional word for sulfur, chiefly used in the phrase “fire and brimstone,” referring to sermons in which churchgoers are dramatically warned about hell

6. brownstone: a building stone, and a type of house commonly clad with a layer of the stone

7. capstone: a slanted stone used on the top layer of a wall to allow water to drain off the top; also, figuratively refers to a high point in one’s experience or life

8. cherrystone: a type of clam

9. clingstone: a type of fruit with flesh connected to the stone, or pit

10. cobblestone: a round stone used to pave streets

11. copestone: see capstone

12. cornerstone: a stone placed on the corner of a building, including one traditionally inscribed with the date the building was constructed; also, figuratively refers to something of fundamental importance

13. coverstone: an aggregate of minerals used to cover treated pavement

14. curbstone: a stone, or concrete, used to form a curb

15. dripstone: a stone that projects over a door or window as an awning, or a stalactite or stalagmite made of calcium carbonate

16. drystone: in British English, an adjective describing a wall constructed of stone without mortar

17. fieldstone: a stone found in a field and used for some purpose without alteration

18. firestone: another word for flint (a type of quartz once used to start fires by sparking), or any stone impervious to high heat

19. flagstone: a flat, hard stone used to make paths

20. flintstone: pieces of flint used in construction

21. flowstone: a deposit of calcite formed by water running along or over a cave’s walls or floor

22. footstone: a stone placed at the foot of a grave

23. freestone: a stone able to be cut without splitting, or a stone, or pit, of a fruit not attached to the flesh or fruit with such a pit

24. gallstone: a hard object that forms in the gallbladder

25. gemstone: a stone of such quality that it can be used in jewelry

26. gladstone: a type of suitcase

27. goldstone: a type of glass to which particles of gold-colored material are applied

28. gravestone: a stone that marks the location of a grave and is often engraved with information about that person

29. greenstone: any of various greenish stones, such as a type of jade

30. grindstone: a turning stone wheel against which hard objects such as tools are smoothed or sharpened

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

Happy Thursday!

Today’s fare is from Words of a Feather: A Humorous Puzzlement of Etymological Pairs, by Murray Suid. Our etymological adventure du jour covers the words menu and minute. Enjoy!

During the next minute or two, you’re going to learn that you know more than you think you do and that it takes brains to eat at a fast-food establishment. Readers, start your chronometers.

The word minute, referring to the unit of time, came into English from the Latin minutus, “small.” This happened in the late fourteenth century, the beginning of the era of accurate time measurement. But the concept of the minute, as a fraction of an hour, traces back to Babylonian texts written about three thousand years earlier. The Babylonians lacked devices that could measure such small units, but they understood their theoretical importance, especially in the study of the heavenly bodies.

Menu, a French word that like minute traces back to the Latin minutus, is a nineteenth-century creation that came about to solve a practical problem: how to let restaurant customers know what items were being served—without consuming too much of the waiters’ time.

The solution was to print a list of foods, known as menu de repas. This phrase might be translated as “a small (description) of foods.” Eventually, continuing the spirit of saving space, menu de repas was shortened to menu.

We’ve become so used to ordering from menus that we don’t realize how much knowledge and prior experience are required in the process. If you’re not convinced, think about offerings such as “Big Mac” (not listed in any ordinary cookbook or dictionary).

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

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As promised, today is the second installment of 14 of the Longest Words in English, by Shundalyn Allen. Today’s list is certain to complete your lesson in sesquipedalianism (see number 14).

7. Strengths has only nine letters, but all except one of them are consonants! This earns the word a Guinness World Record. It is also one of the longest monosyllabic words of the English language.

8. Euouae is six letters long, but all of the letters are vowels. It holds two Guinness World Records. It’s the longest English word composed exclusively of vowels, and it has the most consecutive vowels of any word. If you are wondering about its meaning, it’s a musical term from medieval times.

9. & 10. Unimaginatively has lots of vowels—eight in total, if you count the final y. What’s neat about this word is that its vowels and consonants alternate. It’s not the longest word with alternating consonants and vowels, though. That position is held by honorificabilitudinitatibus, a twenty-seven-letter way of saying “with honorableness.”

11. If you tsktsk someone, you indicate your disapproval by the tsktsk sound or by some other means. Tsktsks is the longest word that doesn’t contain a vowel.

12. & 13. Isograms are words that do not repeat letters. The longest examples are uncopyrightable and subdermatoglyphic. An uncopyrightable song, for example, would not be eligible for copyright. This word has fifteen letters, but one other word without repeated letters is longer—subdermatoglyphic. It’s seventeen letters, but you’ll not have much opportunity to use it outside the realm of dermatology.

14. The fourteenth word on our list describes the tendency to use long words—sesquipedalianism. If you possess this trait, you will enjoy trying to use the words in this article in your next conversation. If you are a true sesquipedalian, it shouldn’t be too hard. Except, of course, for that 189,819-letter protein name . . . it’s doubtful that your friends will wait three hours for you to finish saying it!

And from Robert T., an amusing typo or an amazing new cloud-based application:

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

Symitar Documentation Services

Good morning, everyone! One of you language lovers asked me to do a column on long words, and as you know, your wishes are my commands! I found an interesting article about this very topic, titled 14 of the Longest Words in English, by Shundalyn Allen. Rather than overwhelm you with all 14 at once, we’re going to cover this subject over the next two days. Enjoy!

Yes, this article is about some of the longest English words on record. No, you will not find the very longest word in English in this article. That one word would span about fifty-seven pages. It’s the chemical name for the titin protein found in humans. Its full name has 189,819 letters. Would you like to hear it pronounced? One man helpfully sounds it out in a YouTube video, but pop some popcorn before you get started! It will take you over three hours to watch—it’s just slightly shorter than the film Gone with the Wind. Dictionaries omit the name of this protein and many other long words. Obviously, dictionaries have space constraints, and the average person would have no need to know the technical names of chemicals. Still, there are plenty of lengthy words in dictionaries. Let’s take a moment to appreciate a few of them.

1. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (forty-five letters) is lung disease caused by the inhalation of silica or quartz dust.

2. Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (thirty letters) is a mild form of inherited pseudohypoparathyroidism that simulates the symptoms of the disorder but isn’t associated with abnormal levels of calcium and phosphorus in the blood.

3. Floccinaucinihilipilification (twenty-nine letters) is the estimation of something as valueless. Ironically, floccinaucinihilipilification is a pretty valueless word itself; it’s almost never used except as an example of a long word.

4. Antidisestablishmentarianism (twenty-eight letters) originally described opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England, but now it may refer to any opposition to withdrawing government support of a particular church or religion.

5. What’s the longest word you know? If you watched Mary Poppins as a child, you might quickly think of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (thirty-four letters). Mary Poppins described it as the word to use “when you have nothing to say.” It appears in some (but not all) dictionaries.

6. Incomprehensibilities set the record in the 1990s as the longest word “in common usage.” How many times have you used this twenty-one-letter term?

“There’s a great power in words, if you don’t hitch too many of them together.”–Josh Billings

Kara Church

Technical Editor, Advisory

619-542-6773 | Ext: 766773

Symitar Documentation Services

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Good morning to you! Last week we talked about words created by back-formation (adding or removing a part of the word to create a verb from a noun, for example). Today, I want to discuss a related topic: clipping. I’ve written about this subject before, but today, I’m going to discuss two specific clipped words that turn perfectly happy verbs into unhappy nouns.

First, to remind you, word clipping occurs when you abbreviate a word: for example writing demo instead of demonstration. Yes, most people know what demo means, but in business writing, which is slightly formal, we avoid clipping words (we also avoid contractions). The kind of clipping I’ll discuss today clips a noun to make it shorter; the problem is that the clipped word already exists as a verb.

You want some examples? I’ve got your examples right here!

· I will send you an invite to my fabulous pool party.
(Invite has been clipped from the noun invitation.)

· We will compete the install by Tuesday afternoon.
(Install has been clipped from the noun installation.)

This kind of clipping is a bigger faux pas than regular clipping because clipping these words doesn’t only make them shorter—it changes the word’s “part of speech” (the categories we assign to words: like nouns, verbs, and adjectives). The words invite and install are verbs. They are things you do, which makes the usage in the bullets above grammatically incorrect. You cannot send an invite, you would send an invitation; and you cannot complete an install, you would complete an installation.

I know, I know, a lot of people use invite and install as nouns. I hear it all the time. A lot of people text when they drive and chew with their mouths open, too. (Wow, that sounded just like my mom!)

Oh, and one more thing while I’m on the naggin’ wagon, the word ask is a verb. So, although you might hear others say, “That’s a big ask,” if you want to be grammatically correct, you should say, “That’s a big question” or “That’s a lot to ask.”

Enjoy your week!

Donna Bradley Burcher | Senior Technical Editor | Symitar®

8985 Balboa Ave. | San Diego, CA 92123 | Ph. 619.278.0432 | Extension: 765432

Symitar Technical Publications Writing and Editing Requests

NOTICE: This electronic mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended
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immediately advise the sender by reply email and delete all copies.