Grammar

[Jeff Schering]

On 3/7/06, Rocco Stanzione <grasshopper at linuxkungfu.org> wrote:
> One step ahead of you.  I happen to be in grammar.xml at the moment.  I do
> have one question so far - why the Oxford comma (referred to in the
> styleguide as a series comma)?  Does it simplify i18n somehow?  Stylistically
> it's generally recommended against.
>

Hi Rocco

Woo Hoo! Some help on the style guide!

I have some stuff that I started a while ago; I'll commit it shortly
and you can take a look at it. I have had very little time lately to
work on it, so the new stuff looks like it was started and then
abandoned. Which it was, actually :). I have also started adding
examples to grammar.xml, and have added terminology.xml which covers
how to refer to Ubuntu and how to refer to common GUI elements such as
check boxes and command buttons. Most of the GUI terms come from the
GNOME documentation style guide.

As for the series comma, it's use is recommended in the following guides:
Chicago Manual of Style
Strunk and White's Elements of Style
United States Government Printing Office
NASA's Handbook for Technical Writers and Editors
Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers

and of course the Oxford University Press and Harvard University
Press, who both want the series comma.

Newspaper style guides generally discourage the use of the series
comma, but that is mostly for reasons of space; even the miniscule
room taken up by an extra comma is important in the narrow columns in
newspapers.

The series comma is a contentious issue, but I have decided to use it
because, in general, it reduces abiguity. Perhaps the Ubuntu
sytleguide can be modified to say something like "use the series comma
except when it introduces ambiguity," followed by a few examples,
preferably taken from actual docteam docs.

Cheers,
Jeff

--
Jeff Schering
GPG: F23C67E8