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Assume v. Presume

On 24th March 2007 there was a broadcast of 'Never mind the full stops'. There are posters who consistently use different rules to some of the rules the programme was fronting. Has written English now moved on? If I was to apply for a job would some of the alternative punctuation be preferred?

Quote:
Your task is to weed out all the undesirable apostrophes and insert new ones if needed.

1)
Displayed: My parent's car's both passed their MOT's.
Solution: My parents' cars both passed their MOTs.
2)
Displayed: Its sad that the dogs got one of its paw's stuck.
Solution: It's sad that the dog's got one of its paws stuck.
3)
Displayed: After the days final race, theres going to be a drinks party in the Winners Enclosure.
Solution: After the day's final race, there's going to be a drinks party in the Winners' Enclosure.
4)
Displayed: After three lovely hours' watching cricket at Lords, they took the tube from St. Johns Wood to St. James Park.
Solution: After three lovely hours' watching cricket at Lord's, they took the tube from St. John's Wood to St. James's Park.

Quote:
‘Hours’ should have a possessive apostrophe for watching because it is short for ‘three lovely hours of watching cricket’.
A spelling of James' would imply that there are a lot of Jame people.
 
The solutions to 1, 2, and 3 look fine and completely uncontroversial. In 4, "Lord's" is not an issue because that is its title. "St. John's Wood" and "St. James's Park" are their proper titles so placement of apostrophes should follow the title regardless of correctness, but I have to say that I regard James' as a possessive of James not a possessive of the plural of Jame. The spelling should follow pronunciation, so if the ball belongs to James, do you say "James' ball" or "James's ball"? Either is "correct", it just depends on the flow of the sentence when spoken.

I prefer to omit the dots after "St", but that is my choice.

The most difficult one is the "hours'", I find it hard to regard the hour in that case as a subject rather than an object and would see no need to have the possessive apostrophe. If it were "one lovely hour watching cricket" should there be the apostrophe? If not it shouldn't be there for "three lovely hours" either.

Something I think people who should know better seem to forget: all these things are matters of style and personal choice. One might choose to adhere rigidly to received convention so as to make the right impression on the target audience; some don't understand there is a choice to be made and presume received convention is automatically the correct and only way; others don't even know there is a convention (or not know how to use it). If the target audience is so blinkered as to think the way they punctuate is the only acceptable way, then obviously you take a risk by not pandering to that view. As far as I am concerned the "crime" is not to have made a conscious decision, and to be inconsistent.
 
That's interesting 4291. I was taught that the full stop was to represent missing letters and that the missing letters in St, Mr and Mrs are absent from the middle of the word and not the end and that the convention was not to use a full stop in the middle. A full stop at the end was never concidered. If I am writing for an American audience I now add a full stop at the end as adding a full stop at the end appears to be the US convention.
 
Luke said:
concidered
Click to expand...
Oops!

Apostrophes indicate missing letters, suffix dots indicate abbreviations - so "Saint" could be "S't" or "St.". Examples "ma'am", "ha'penny", "o'clock". As I think I have mentioned before, suffix dots became unfashionable when typewriters had fixed pitch typefaces and therefore the dot occupied a disproportionate amount of space.
 
Here is another one to consider: An ellipsis is a series of dots used to indicate an unfinished thought for example. How many dots? Well as a mathematician it is convential to use three dots to indicate a finite sequence such as the counting numbers less than 100 which would be written 1. 2, ... , 99. But four dots are used to indicate an infinite sequence such as all the all the counting numbers which would be written as 1, 2, 3, ....
 
Black Hole said:
As I think I have mentioned before, suffix dots became unfashionable when typewriters had fixed pitch typefaces and therefore the dot occupied a disproportionate amount of space.
Click to expand...
I wonder why, then, it used to be customary to add two spaces after the full stop at the end of a sentence?
Luke said:
If I was to apply for a job would some of the alternative punctuation be preferred?
Click to expand...
Surely for accuracy it should be "If I were to apply for a job..."?
 
Trev said:
I wonder why, then, it used to be customary to add two spaces after the full stop at the end of a sentence?
Click to expand...
I still do, I prefer it so that the eye scans the text properly, I teach that way, and anything that passes my way for editing leaves with a double space after the full stop. We did in the tech pubs department at work also.

Unfortunately the forum software insists on compressing any number of spaces to one when displayed.
 
It's not the forum. HTML ignores multiple spaces unless they're coded using the non-breaking space code [ ].
 
Spaces are preserved inside code tags. Does that mean they are converted to non-breaking spaces for display?
 
Trev said:
I wonder why, then, it used to be customary to add two spaces after the full stop at the end of a sentence?
Click to expand...

That's one of the evils of the adoption of WYSIWYG! The end-of-sentence space in typesetting used to be between one and two spaces, and looked better. There isn't a half-spacebar!

Don't get me started on dashes—you will not want to know! 80‒90% of dashes are ill-conceived, mostly because they aren't on the standard keyboard.

In 40 years as a professional mathematician I never once met a sequence of four dots, though!

Black Hole said:
:oops:

Took long enough for someone to spot it!
Click to expand...

:rolleyes:
 
I find most people who have started using WP with no formal training in typing have no idea about the double-space sentence separator. When I receive copy for a newsletter I edit, quite often it contains en-dashes or em-dashes because the WP has auto-replaced a hyphen dash (but I have decided to use hyphen dashes throughout that particular publication).
 
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