Re: And Or situations

Subject: Re: And Or situations
From: Lauren <lauren -at- writeco -dot- net>
To: TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:31:45 -0700

On 10/22/2013 1:58 PM, McLauchlan, Kevin wrote:

There was an editorial style guide for the General Style Guide, that said:

- if you use a construction 10 times or more in the Guide, make a rule... and mostly stick to it.

Looks like "and/or" didn't reach the threshold.

OK, I made that up.

Ackk! XD You totally had me on that for a very brief moment.

I happen to like "and/or" when I want a compact way to say, "Use one or the other, or use both" in the middle of a sentence (like an instruction step) where extra words get in the way.

I never like slashes in sentences, they are so violent, like prison shivs.

To a previous poster, if I intended to also express ".... or neither", I might say "either/both/neither"... but I have yet to encounter a place where that was needed in my docs.

I would rewrite anything like that.

As for AP and Reuters... do they matter?

Not too much but journalism style guides oppose the serial comma a little more than others and the discussion of legal writing floated in that put Reuters right in the middle, since they host both journalism and legal publications.

...

I bet, if there are any decent news-readers left, they insist on serial commas on the teleprompter, for what should be obvious reasons. But I have no way to verify that hunch.

Nice catch. Punctuation was designed to reflect inflections in speech and then it got all wrapped in rules of visual presentation. I think the formalization of documentation with punctuation may soften a bit with more people reading (thanks, Internet) and wanting to read something that in their head sounds like a person talking.





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References:
And Or situations: From: Cardimon, Craig
Re: And Or situations: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: And Or situations: From: Milan Davidović
Re: And Or situations: From: Robert Lauriston
Re: And Or situations: From: Lauren
Re: And Or situations: From: Robert Lauriston
Re: And Or situations: From: Lauren
RE: And Or situations: From: McLauchlan, Kevin

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