Flammie

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Flammie on English typography and stuff

English is the language of science, but as we all know, most of the scientists are not really fluent with English. The English used in science is supposed to be so-called academic English, I have rants about that on this site elsewhere. However, since peer review in academia is in effect performed by people who are not experts in written English, even in (computational) linguistics reviewing, the result ends up more of a random collection of often wrong and misguided writing rules that were taught in English classes 50 years ago in elementary school in non-English speaking country X. This is a list of my pet peeves where reviewers will insist on corrections that make things more wrong.

Em dash

Perhaps one of my most overuse punctuation is also the one I receive miscorrections the most. In English, the most typical dash to set of side clauses or other remarks or stuff, is em dash, that is written next to the word most typically without spaces. I use it for most titles to set off the title from the subtitle and most sub-clauses that are kind of remarks, not as far removed to have a footnote but not as central to be embedded in the main sentence more directly. The m-dash, written in TeX by three hyphens, looks like ‘—’. Most of my article titles look like “Doing something very effectively—a case study for these languages”. I have been more than once asked to simply rewrite the title. This is a type example of where other languages do have spaces around these dashes and most likely some misguided English teachers in some countries insist that is correct also for English. It is a style used nowadays in some newspapers already, but anyone who has read more than few books in English should still know it’s not the most common style.

Percent sign

Percent sign is same as any unit designation and requires a (non-breaking) space in front of it. Five metres is 5 m and five percents is 5 %. This is probably more common to be written wrongly than correctly everywhere so it is definetely not a hill to die on anymore.