[Sending to the list, now that I have access to a computer. I also added a bit more to it.]
Hi Branden! On 7/23/22 04:50, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
Thank you; I appreciate the review. Yours is the first it's gotten since I rewrote it.[ spaces, or tabs. (AT&T tbl accepted only options with all characters in the same lettercase.) Some of these ] since the parenthesized sentence refers to the sentence previous to it, I'd put it as part of it (notice the placement of periods): [ spaces, or tabs (AT&T tbl accepted only options with all characters in the same lettercase). Some of these ]I disagree with this, because I find it awkward to put one complete sentence as a parenthetical inside another. I believe a sentence should remain grammatical even if the parentheses are removed. I admit to some severity on this point, but all too often as a reader, I find amateur technical writers employing punctuation as an excuse to discard the rules of standard grammar. That is not what punctuation is for.
I guess it's standard practice in English... In Spanish it's extremely uncommon to see parenthetical full sentences not attached to another one. In English I've seen it a lot; especially in mtk's text (that's when I realized those existed, actually).
I searched in the Spanish dictionary, and there's not much of relevance. Only a rule that I agreed with Michael that it's bad: in Spanish, if you insist to use a separate parenthetical as you did, the period goes after the closing parenthesis (so you can't blindly remove parentheses and their content; you need to check if there's spurious punctuation). See <https://www.rae.es/dpd/par%C3%A9ntesis> if you understand Spanish.
More interesting is a link found in that page, documenting the "raya" (em dash). It documents that in Spanish, em dashes are single-side spaced: <https://www.rae.es/dpd/raya>. And also interestingly --and this is something that also got me mad with English texts--, Spanish em dashes are written in both sides even if one of them is next to punctuation --in which case it loses the space, of course--. The Spanish rules for em dashes are much nicer IMO :-)
And the Spanish rules also indicate that the level of isolation from the main text is, from more isolation to less isolation: em dash, commas, parentheses.
Cheers, Alex -- Alejandro Colomar Linux man-pages comaintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
