Snap, Dana!

Word order takes care of most problems. "Young Pleiades cited the warping influence of God, Ayn Rand and her parents; then she discovered country music."

Yeah, but that word order TOTALLY has the timeline wrong!

(Though, yes, country music was the final nail warping my high school years. College was warped by Melrose Place and The X Files.)

I refuse to be bullied and insulted into embracing sloppy writing over precision.

As evidenced above, it's not always more precise. The general application can create ambiguity as well.

Oh, well, if wikipedia says so...

As you might expect, it's a pretty well-sourced argument. However, I did include the example of the Oxford Style and Writing Guide. If Oxford doesn't want the Oxford comma, then I'll leave it to Tep.

When P-Cow's career advances to where he's the science writer for the New York Times, he can twist in consistent agony as his editor prunes all the serial commas out.

I refuse to be bullied and insulted into embracing sloppy writing over precision.

t high fives!

Look, there's room for being flexible, and that room is known as style guides for whatever you're working on. How do you format a note? Do you do Note: or do you do Note  ? What does the style guide say? Maybe for one project, it's a colon. Maybe for the other, two non-breaking spaces following the bold. Either way looks snappy and professional, so long as it's the same way throughout your docset, dude.

Same with disputed punctuation guidelines. Pick it and stick it. If it doesn't work for the next project to do it the way you did for the last, switch it, but for the love of all that is holy and I am including Hall & Oates in that, be consistent.

And, MAN, I am so. freaking. happy. that I no longer have to proof things for a living. Or keep track of three different style guides at once.

And, MAN, I am so. freaking. happy. that I no longer have to proof things for a living. Or keep track of three different style guides at once.

Have I mentioned that my new duties at work have included literally hours of discussion on how many spaces follow a colon, when to use a "the" before a court name and when to leave it out, and when to spell out numbers?

I refuse to be bullied and insulted into embracing sloppy writing over precision.

As evidenced above, it's not always more precise. The general application can create ambiguity as well.

The lack of precision is from not sticking to one consistent style; that is, switching from serial commas to non-serial commas in the same piece of writing (or publication). That is inconsistent and sloppy.

And, MAN, I am so. freaking. happy. that I no longer have to proof things for a living. Or keep track of three different style guides at once.

Which is why most publishers stick with the Chicago Manual of Style.

Have I mentioned that my new duties at work have included literally hours of discussion on how many spaces follow a colon, when to use a "the" before a court name and when to leave it out, and when to spell out numbers?

As much as I loved hitting the style council meetings, man, I'm glad I'm out of that.

The best part is I usually end up saying "I do it this way, but I will gladly change and do it your way, as long as you tell me that that is going to be the rule" and then the woman in charges spends 20 minutes going back and forth with herself and then says "okay, let's do it [Perkin]'s way".

Which is why most publishers stick with the Chicago Manual of Style.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Tech, where even within a company, different orgs (and hell, different groups within an org) will find a need to roll their own. (A legit one, with both usability concerns and legal reasoning behind it.)

CMoS informs a lot of it, of course, but once you get into the granular, the style guides leave a body in a constant state of headache from sorting them out.