Style Bites » S

commas, serial

Adam — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:53:08 +0000

I want those apples, oranges, and pears.
I want mushrooms, onions, and sausage on my pizza.

I want to see you all using the serial comma. Your English teacher may have beaten into you that you drop the comma before the and. S/he wasn’t necessarily wrong. You can drop it or use it. I think it adds clarity to a sentence, and we should employ it.

Serious Eats world headquarters

Adam — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:48:19 +0000

Note the capitalization scheme here. Not “Serious Eats World Headquarters.”

Serious Eats, Serious Eaters

Adam — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:37:46 +0000

Let’s keep the use of “Serious Eats” and “Serious Eaters” to a minimum within posts. Too much self-reference starts to wear thin.

Also, in that vein, let’s set a style here. I’ve seen too much inconsistency when we use the term “Serious Eater(s).” It gets capped or lowercased with no rhyme or reason. From now on, if you *must* use it (see above), cap it: “All you Serious Eaters out there … “

state names

Adam — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:29:25 +0000

SPELL THEM OUT. There are only very, very rare instances where we don’t spell them out. So let’s not use the two-letter postal abbreviations. When they’re used as part of a city-state combo, you put a comma after the city name and after the state name: John Smith lives in the Walla Walla, Washington, area.

Believe me, if you think spelling them out is a pain and you want a shorter way, I can give you one — but you don’t want it because it consists of remembering the AP abbreviations, and we don’t wanna go there.