I suspect there are a large number of people who have english as their mother tongue but don't have a handle on grammar.
I always like to use the "Oxford comma", as used in all books published by the Oxford University Press. To be fair, majority opinion among pedants generally is against Oxford commas - but debate continues. Serial comma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I love a spot of grammar, I find it very frustrating when it's either missing or incorrectly used. However, there are so many exceptions to every rule that it's sometimes hard to remember it all. At least I try
Surely people who buy Ducatis are smart people by definition? That's my assumption anyway. Feel free to prove me wrong.
It's the first one, except that you need a space between "in" and "wealth" and another one between "of" and "transactions". Clearly. I've not heard of the Oxford comma as such, but I don't like it now that I have had a look. You could argue that my previous sentence with a comma before "but" is wrong, but it's there to point out the pause I would say (or not say - ha!) before coming to the "but". I hate it in Word where the spell-checker tries to add a comma before all relative clauses. Most people don't write like that and I am sure it is Microsoft, American meddling. When evaluating the importance of pedantry in your writing, just be aware that business operates in a particularly illiterate fashion and there is no one likely to be reading your thing who would know whether these things are right or wrong (although if you put your commas before the brackets in your example, I would notice). It also follows in your example that the second reference should come before the full-stop as it is still part of the same idea.
It wasn't for business, it was for an open university essay, which would probably be read by someone likely to notice these things. I made a grammatical error on my last one. 'It is' and the possessive form of 'it' do not follow standard rules for apostrophes. 'It's' is short for it is, 'its' is the possessive form; no apostrophe. It's time to give the cat its food. Written down, I can see that it looks correct, but until I had made the mistake and had it pointed out to me, I had never though about the rules for that particular combination. Here is the sentence I made the mistake on : "The modernist approach and the flexibleapproach both recognise roads as having their own rules compared toit'ssurroundings, however the modern approach views the road within astreet as a separate system within a place, requiring a physicalseparation between the two." Now I read this again, over a month after writing it I can see a much smoother way to write it. "The modernist approach and the flexible approach both recognise a road as having its own rules compared to its surroundings, however the modern approach views the road within a street as a separate system within a place, requiring a physical separation between the two." With the correct for of possessive 'it'. glidd: I always put my references after my full stops unless I have to have 2 references in the same sentence to avoid ambiguity. Should I be including them as you described? I've nearly finished my first year of study now. I have 2 more assignments to write and I'm 1/6th of the way to a BA(Hons) and hopefully a better job.
If you'd done a BSc or BEng no-one wouldve given a toss about the comma. But had you not calculated to at least 4 decimal places the nerds would be screaming blue murder.
Good stuff Tom. I'm a languages graduate, so I am probably hotter on French and Spanish grammar than on English. Most of my understanding of English grammar comes from reading many books (both fiction and non fiction) and from writing myself. After all, as a qualification in English, I only have a couple of O Levels. But I don't remember any of my supervisors at Cambridge (tutors at Oxford) taking exception to the way I wrote my essays. The "its", "it's" question is pretty basic - O Level stuff. Fair enough. As for the inclusion of references, my gut instinct would be definitely to include the brackets before the comma (I'd bet big money on that being right) and, if a second reference is included in the same sentence, I'd include the brackets before the full-stop as this makes for consistency. Suppose you only had one reference, what then? Personally, I'd still include the brackets before the full-stop, but it's less flagrant if you decide to put the reference after it. I don't think that is particularly jarring, myself. In a bullet-point list, for example, it might be OK to have full-stops, OK to not have them (so long as everything is consistent) and if you are having them, to include the references in brackets after the full-stop. Personally, I don't think it matters a great deal, but I am sure some boring person will have written a whole article about it in a grammar book. Some things are just hopelessly wrong, others are more a question of personal preference and style. Read many different authors and you will see just how open to interpretation much of this is. Certainly, the modern tendency is for fewer commas than more, as flow is considered important. These things become a bit second nature. I don't agonise too much over them, and even less for posts on this forum (which I just sort of reel off, although I normally check over before hitting the "post" button, to make sure that there aren't any glaring typos.
The comma after "surroundings" could do with being a full stop, or at least a semi-colon. The sections before and after that comma are both full sentences, so a comma is not quite enough. At University level, if you get something right which those who read it are too ignorant or careless to notice, that is just fine; but if you get something wrong through ignorance which the reader spots, then that means the reader's opinion of you becomes "Could do better".
