Timeline for Should enclosing commas be treated as parentheses?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 8, 2013 at 21:15 | vote | accept | Chris Steinbach | ||
| Feb 8, 2013 at 9:14 | answer | added | MetaEd | timeline score: 7 | |
| Feb 7, 2013 at 16:42 | vote | accept | Chris Steinbach | ||
| Feb 8, 2013 at 21:15 | |||||
| Feb 7, 2013 at 13:23 | comment | added | Nanne | I'd say it depends on how you want to treat the first comma. If it is a list of people that are blind (making the first comma an 'oxford comma' if I'm not mistaken) you are indeed correct to use 'were' as your subject is now "zoe and the other kids". If it is the start of a "parenthetical element", then the subject is still Zoe. | |
| Feb 6, 2013 at 22:33 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | Have you ever seen a rule stipulating that what goes inside parentheses must be a (traditionally-defined, ie leave-a-syntactically-acceptable-and-not-grossly-semantically-changed-if-deleted-) parenthesis? Or did nobody see this one coming? | |
| Feb 6, 2013 at 22:14 | comment | added | Jon Hanna | @EdwinAshworth It seems that rather than the traditional grammar-rule war, StoneyB and I have reached a sort of truce since we both concluded from opposite directions that it's better to rewrite to avoid the whole thing. Now to see if we both get uncommented downvotes for opposite reasons... | |
| Feb 6, 2013 at 22:13 | answer | added | amanda witt | timeline score: 0 | |
| Feb 6, 2013 at 22:09 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackEnglish/status/299278570855989248 | ||
| Feb 6, 2013 at 22:05 | answer | added | StoneyB on hiatus | timeline score: 16 | |
| Feb 6, 2013 at 22:04 | answer | added | Jon Hanna | timeline score: 6 | |
| Feb 6, 2013 at 22:01 | comment | added | Edwin Ashworth | Yes - here we have conflicting rules. No doubt someone will cite a 'super-rule' dictating how we must handle agreement here. Then, probably, someone will cite another authority with a different opinion (if the first dictator bothered to acknowledge any authority in the first place). Perhaps someone will weigh in with some supporting statistics. The snag is, there isn't a consensually accepted grammar czar in English. Or perhaps that's a good thing. | |
| Feb 6, 2013 at 21:56 | review | First posts | |||
| Feb 6, 2013 at 22:13 | |||||
| Feb 6, 2013 at 21:40 | history | asked | Chris Steinbach | CC BY-SA 3.0 |