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Peeves, opinions, and hot takes about style
The recent topic on grammar errors that actually matter got me interested in all of your opinions about style. Working in academia, I have developed a surprising number of strong opinions about style and formatting over the years. I'm curious to hear what you all care about. I am also curious to see if I can be persuaded to cool down some of my own hot takes based on your responses. I'll share a few to get us started.
- For the love of all that is holy, do not put a footnote in a title or in an abstract.
- Similarly, do not put a citation in a title or an abstract!
- An abstract should be... an abstract, not your life story or even a summary of the paper. It most certainly should not develop and defend arguments.
- Does a published manuscript really need to be double spaced?
- I'm in the punctuation-inside-quotations camp, but I am open to the alternative. I am somewhat of a weirdo in believing that individual authors should be free to use either style (so long as they remain consistent in their usage).
- Bibliographies should prioritize the language of the original source; meaning, it is ridiculous to transliterate the titles of non-Latin works in a bibliography. What are you going to do with that information? If you don't know that language, then it is utterly meaningless, and even more so because you can't even do anything with that transliterated text. Plus, good luck getting a standard transliteration out of anyone. All this does is just obscure the fact that these sources were cited, at least as far as indexers are concerned. It would make more sense to just include translated titles next to the original, but eliminating the non-Latin text altogether is so absurd (looking at you APA).
- On a similar note, foreign words should not be italicized or emphasized any other way just because they appear in a text. All this does is fill up the text with needless emphasis that distracts from the things you do mean to emphasize.
Okay, I will stop here before I cross the threshold where I won't be able to get anymore work done today! :b
My peeve applies to online articles more than academic papers, but it's pull quotes. I hate them. I'm already reading the article, I don't need you to shove some bit of it that you thought was poignant in my face again five paragraphs later. It's like if you were watching a Mission Impossible movie and all of a sudden in the middle of an unrelated scene they show a slow-motion replay of Tom Cruise doing a stunt from 10 minutes earlier in the movie for absolutely no reason. Of course they wouldn't do that, because it would be so stupid and it would ruin the movie. Just like your stupid pull quotes ruin your article.
Hah, I love this one. Equally annoying is when they use the pull quote in lieu of the words in the text. I try hard not to read the pull quotes so all of a sudden the text just stops making sense to me.
I have never encountered that, but it makes me cringe a little to think about it.
What really gets me about pull quotes on the web is that if you are using reader view or a screen reader, you can see that the pull quotes are often repeated in the document. So rather than including them as an aside that can be conditionally omitted from the main text, they are just repeated within the actual text of the page. It can be pretty jarring depending on the length of the quote and how far away from its original occurrence the pull quote is placed.
Oh, pull quotes after the passage they’re quoting would be a marked improvement — most of the time when I notice them it’s because they use them well in advance of where they come from, so it’s like spoilers for the later parts of the article. For well-crafted articles that are conscious of pacing and drama, it completely ruins the experience!
To borrow your example, in the middle of an intense fight scene where the bad guy is gaining the upper hand, don’t cut forward to the bad guy bleeding out on the ground! Let me arrive at that place when it’s ready!
I certainly don't read enough papers or manuscripts to have strong opinions on most of these issues. For #5 specifically though, I have a strong preference for punctuation outside of quotations. It probably stems from my experience as a programmer, where a string of text is very precise (this is exactly what I'm quoting). The American-style of placing punctuation inside feels like it's modifying the quote, and the sentence then feels improperly terminated. But I'm sure it's just a matter of familiarity.
I'm also one of the dozen people that still enters two spaces between sentences in all writing. My 30 years of muscle memory cannot be defeated by any measly style guidelines in Microsoft Word. I can and will wear out my space bar, and nobody can stop me. Except for 99% of writing on the web, where the extra spaces are silently collapsed into one anyway. But it's a fun surprise for those clicking More > View Markdown underneath my comment, at least.
"Logical quotation" is the current term for that. (As a programmer, I do it too.)
ETA:
I'm with you on the two spaces between sentences. Anyone who looks at my markdown here will see the same thing. That said, while it's currently seen as antiquated typographically for text set in a proportional typeface, there's an argument that it's still relevant for monospaced text. A good amount of my prose ends up in code comments and commit log messages which are viewed that way, so that tends to support my habit. Also, I do my coding in Emacs, which by default recognizes sentences boundaries by double spaces to distinguish them from abbreviations.
As someone who writes this way, I fully understand. It is especially awkward when you have conflicting punctuation, such as when you are asking a question that contains an exclamatory quote. For example:
This also feels crazy to me:
I am surprised that there have never been (to my knowledge) any ligatures invented to address this. Not that I am suggesting that's a good idea. This is a tricky one. I feel like I will always be on the fence about it.
I typed this way when I first learned in the 90s. Then at some point, probably in school, I learned that it was unnecessary. It is interesting that your extra spaces get censored automatically. I sometimes edit manuscripts of authors who type that way and I usually do not change it.
Yeah, I prefer punctuation outside the quotes in theory, but it is just so visually awful. Maybe we should use { } for quotes from now on.
Some languages use 《these kinds of things as quotes》, which feels less awkward with the punctuation on the inside or outside.
«I usually see these ones.» Do they look weird like «this»? I suspect they would if I were a native French speaker, for example.
But I also like their "solution" : they put a space before and after certain punctuation marks. So you end up with
« this » ?or"this" ?.If you have an iPhone double space turns into a period and a space. I believe that's the default on MacOS as well, although I have it disabled since I'm also a programmer.
I do put punctuation inside quotations because that's what I learned, but when I learned it it never felt right for exactly the reason you said. I'm accustomed to it now so it feels right, although I don't believe putting punctuation outside feels wrong to me; so I might attempt switching over. Like your double-spacing, it might be a hard habit to break.
As a side note, I thought this thread was going to be about fashion when I clicked into it 😂
I can confirm that’s been the default on iPhone for quite a while, but I think not forever. I could be wrong but I vaguely remember learning to type on a soft keyboard without double space behaving that way, and then had to turn that setting off when it was introduced because it bothered me so much. If I want to put a bunch of spaces in my text, I don’t think my phone should be able to decide what I mean.
I’ve also been on a number of crusades with my iPhone about autocorrecting (without the usual little button appearing when autocorrect wants to actually change my bad spelling) three periods into a single
ellipseellipsis punctuation. I don’t care how correct it is, I don’t like that for every other circumstance, the number of characters I type equals the number of backspaces I need to go back, and then this keeps popping up in various updates over the years and breaks my muscle memory and I end up deleting more than I intended. The most frustrating part is that many years ago, they added this as default behaviour but gave me a setting to disable it. Some time in the last year or two, they seem to have re-enabled this behaviour without also giving me a setting to turn off, so I’ve resorted to some horrendous manual entries into my text replacement library.Go to settings > general > keyboard > replacements. Ass three dots as a replacement without a shortcut. It should stop correcting away from that.
Yeah that’s definitely helped a bit, but it’s not 100% successful.
Part of the problem is that the default behaviour is to turn three dots into ellipsis immediately but autocorrect (and/or the keyboard replacements you suggested) only apply after I hit spacebar to continue typing, so if I type the three dots and immediately backspace three times, I delete the last two characters of the preceding word too
Ah yeah, I was wondering if the ellipses replacement was some system level thing that would lead to some wonky interactions with the text replacements. I was going to suggest having it replace two dots with three dots, but that doesn’t solve your typing = characters out requirement. Well, sorry I couldn’t help you out.
This is me 100%. We should start a club.
This must slightly annoy my boss because he always comments on it, along the lines of "I can tell when you've written a document because it has two spaces after the periods."
As far as I am concerned, if people really care, fonts could be made smart enough to render
period+two spaces+Capital letterthe same as one space, so I see no reason to change.I wonder if we know of any websites that automatically render two spaces as just one. That would be annoying! Looks like Tildes renders them as God and I intended.
Ha, that's great!
I don't understand : what is an abstract but a brief summary of the paper?
You are right that it is a summary. I couldn't think of a better word for what I meant. An abstract is sometimes distinguished from a generic summary because it is supposed to be an almost literal overview not just of the content, but the structure of the paper. I always describe it as the contour or silhouette of the paper. It is meant to give you the gist of the paper, specifically, its thesis, methods, findings/conclusion, etc. My peeve is when the abstract doesn't just state or describe these, but instead gives too much detail or attempts to justify conclusions, rationale behind the methods, etc. To explain it with an analogy: say your name is John Smith, and instead of abstracting your name into the initials JS, you add other "details" such as JHSIT. It is not necessarily wrong, but it is not as clear. Kind of a weird example, but maybe it makes sense?
The explanation that I've seen is that an abstract should be a brief summary giving the gist for other experts in your field, who need very little hand-holding. The introduction, related work, and background sections are for a wider audience where you can try to bring interested non-experts up to speed.
That's a nice explanation, and would explain the needless elaboration in an abstract that peeves me so much. Also the tendency to define terms, etc.
I remembered that instead of summary, I was trying to say "pitch," kind of like the back cover of a book of fiction. I sometimes encounter papers that have abstracts that seem to almost... advertize the paper. In their defense, it does work apparently, because in order to see what the paper is about I have to download and skim it!
Can I add something about documentation in the workplace?
It drives me up the wall when I seek out documentation and I found someone has documented system processes, with screenshots, in Excel. I'm talking 10+ tabs with varied formatting, highlighting galore, and absolutely no table structure. I can understand putting some things in Excel, like data mappings and stuff, but not written steps and instructions with pictures. When someone on my team gives me this style of documentation, I have to tell them its a great start for personal reference, but they need to write everything out in a structured document.
Wow, I am not sure I will be able to sleep at night, thank you! haha
I have never encountered that exactly, but I can appreciate the horror. For a long time my university used to send out all of its official emails as a jpeg of a document in Word. Why? My only guess is so that it would preserve the formatting and have the university letterhead and everything. But still, what about a pdf or just making an html template for everyone to use? It seems like they just defaulted to the simplest approach that everyone could follow. I brought it up for years that this effectively excludes all faculty and students who have vision problems. Thankfully, some laws were passed that require us to take accessibility seriously.
I can't remember the last time I saw a manuscript in that style. Most of the papers I read in my field are single-spaced with two columns. That tends to be enforced by the journal and conference style sheets, however. (I did experiment with the one-sentence-per-line thing when drafting my last submission, but LaTeX just formats that into the usual single-spaced two column PDF for me.)
This isn't really something that I see in my field, but I think a good compromise might be to treat it like an abbreviation - emphasize it once to call attention when you introduce the term, then just use it plainly thereafter.
Now some of my own:
Don't treat citations as part of the text. Instead of:
use something like:
Do treat math as part of the text (place commas between equations in a group, place periods after equations that end a sentence, or continue the text of the sentence after the last equation):
Some style guides officially require it (I want to say MLA does). It isn't as common as it used to be, but it is still alive and well, apparently. I notice it a lot in theses and dissertations. In my mind, the extra space is for proofreading. Especially when left-justified, double-spacing makes it harder to read.
This is sensible! And I believe some style guides take this approach.
That's a good one! A minor difference, but it makes the text so much more legible. Lately, I have been trying to convert all of my papers to html to serve on my blog, and I have found that the "note" style of citation is the least intrusive when it comes to legibility. It does add a lot of footnotes, but especially in a digital format where you can easily navigate back and forth, it seems like a nice approach.
Does this also mean that the equations should be in-line with the text rather than being treated kind of like a blockquote (on their own paragraph with narrower margins etc.)? The only problem with that is that depending on what symbols the equation contains, you may end up in a scenario where your manuscript has varying line heights. This happens when intermixing East Asian scripts with Latin ones, too. Anyway, I am curious what you envision, because typesetting math involves some important design choices. I'm always looking for new ways to approach formatting my own papers (on my blog, or preprints, etc.).
Yep, MLA is double spaced. Every single paper in my school life was MLA. That got me into trouble here in France. The teacher didn’t tell us a silly guide, so I defaulted to MLA, and lost points for. Then on the next assignment, I used APA like they requested, and again lost points because they wanted some differences from real APA and didn’t tell us what those were.
This is another peeve of mine, actually: that journals will say to strictly adhere to some style guide, but in reality they don't necessarily follow it beyond things like citation formatting. The cherrypicking is frustrating because it just makes for more editing later on down the pipeline.
Now that you mention it, my own dissertation was double-spaced! I remember hating the required style at the time (it looked so typographically ugly to me), but that's what the thesis editor demanded, so that's what they got. I think I'd blocked that from my memory. :-)
In the LaTeX typesetting system common in computer science (my field), the two math modes are called "inline" and "display". But it's fairly common stylistically to treat math typeset in either form as part of the text and to punctuate accordingly. You're absolutely correct about line heights and it's one of the criteria that I'll use when deciding which mode to use. Inline mode is convenient if it's small and flows neatly with the rest of the text on the line without disrupting it. It's also often used for negative numbers since a proper minus sign is not the same as a hyphen. Display mode is good if the math is too big to fit conveniently, too tall to match the line, or would interrupt it in some other way. I'll also use display mode if I really want to highlight the math as important, or if I want it to be numbered so that I can reference it later:
I can certainly see how mixing East Asian scripts with Latin ones can be problematic, though fortunately, that's not a problem that I've ever had to deal with.
The committee for my dissertation told me to follow a vaguely APA-like style that was double-spaced, so I pointed to the graduate school handbook that said to pick a style and stick to it. So I asserted my right to follow the CMOS, which also gave me a lot more options for typesetting it.
Looks like we are on opposite sides of the spectrum! Pretty much everything I write is multilingual, and the only time typesetting math comes up is when I am doing editing jobs for a monograph or something.
Wow, I can't think of any time recently where I've gone from so strongly agreeing with a comment (regarding citations in text) to do strongly disagreeing (for equations with punctuation).
Tell me at least that you only do this for inline equations, please!
Nope, even for displayed math! It's a fairly common convention. For example, from Wikipedia's style guide (emphasis mine):
As an example of how old this convention is, take a look at the typography of this short publication from 1946; you'll see it includes commas and periods at the ends of displayed equations and not just the inline ones. Going back farther, here's a scan of a book from 1905 -- page nine of that one (the second page of the table of contents) even has an example of semicolon at the end of a displayed equation.
(I find this convention to be one of those things where you don't notice it until someone draws your attention to it, and then you start to see it everywhere.)
Specifically for journal articles, I think the royal we should be used even if written by a single individual.
Interesting! I would be curious to hear more about your rationale.
I've seen it justified as including the reader (e.g., "We explore..." meaning the author and the reader explore an idea together). That may just be a post-hoc rationalization however.
My last submission was a solo paper (fingers crossed!) and I used the royal we, as weird as that felt, after double-checking other solo papers at this venue. My main justification to myself was that I was helping to preserve anonymity during peer review; I didn't want to give a clue about the number of authors.
My preference ultimately comes down to taste (multi-author papers are such the norm in my area that when I read “I” in a paper it immediately distracts me). That being said, I do feel that sticking to the royal we makes it feel more universal — “we” have increased our knowledge.
People do this? I would expect such a paper to be of the caliber of Why Einstein et al. (1927) are dum-dums.
It is pretty rare, but I have come across it enough to be annoyed by it. I wish I had some examples saved, but one that comes to mind was a paper that had some special jargon in the title, and for some reason they felt the need to cite the occurrence of that word right then and there.
I can somewhat understand the urge to do this sort of thing, but it seems crazy for any editor or publisher to allow such a thing to exist in the wild. It messes up the bibliographic metadata, but that is also just a whole other can of worms.
I feel like little odd mentioning my peeves at all - I'm big into the idea that language is about communication first and foremost, but a couple things have crept up on me.
Don't use "one" as a pronoun. It sounds so weird to me and pulls me right out of whatever I'm reading. Someone on reddit mentioned they'd been told "you" was rude; I don't know of they misunderstood or were taught weirdly or their teacher had a weird peeve, but it seems to be a common thing going around the past several years.
Oxford commas! Don't care. It's really easy to miss a comma on a phone screen, or even a big computer screen. I'd try to rewrite the sentence so it's unambiguous either way.
I use it just to be consistent.