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There are no punctuation rules on stolen land.
The name of this bowl confused me. Point me to a bowl where I can talk about copywriting.
I let the editors worry about this. I’ve never won an award for perfect grammar, but I’ve won a few for good writing that ignored the rules.
I have a working knowledge of grammar. I just don’t spend too much time worrying whether something is 3 periods or an ellipses. Because, again, I have editors who do that and then I get to decide if I want to enact their changes or stet them.
In my 17 year career, I’ve never worked at an agency that didn’t have editors. The one I’m at has 4 on staff right now. If I find myself in a world where I have no editors, I will ask AI and then make a decision like usual. Fairly simple concept I needed to explain there, but I hope that was sufficient.
You sound like me pointing out fonts on shop signs while on vacation
Around 50% of us are unemployed. About 95% of those were laid off.
About 40% of Iran’s leaders were axed which means there’s a 95% chance of some sort of retaliation that will probably hit us in New York within the next decade, yet we are here in a bowl called “Copywriters” where I made a post about copywriting.
Just a note: if you work in pharma, AMA style applies. Instead of an “en” dash separating numbers, use a hyphen. No periods between abbreviations like “US” and “ie”. There are different rules about initial capping headlines. And a lot of other idiosyncratic rules that differ from the standard Chicago Manual of Style type of guidelines.
I’m really glad you pointed this out.
Yes, AMA uses a hyphen for “through,” but it still uses an en dash for compound modifiers. This is because a lot of medical terminology uses hyphens. For example, “HIV-1–positive patients” has both a hyphen and an en dash.
Note that the Fishbowl typeface sucks, where all three kinds of dashes look almost the same. Look:
-
–
—
Other typefaces don’t have this issue. (PS: Hold down the hyphen on an iPhone to access all the dashes.)
Style books that use an en dash for “through”:
• Chicago Manual of Style
• MLA Handbook
• APA Publication Manual
Style books that use a plain hyphen for “through”:
• AP Stylebook
• AMA Manual of Style
The AP Stylebook has many rules based around saving newspaper ink. They are most famous for nixing the Oxford comma for this reason. AMA cherry-picked their styles from other manuals and tweaked the rules based on its usage for medical professionals and for who would be typing medical papers (usually not a person well-versed in the finer art of making books).
Chicago is the most balanced style book in my opinion, especially since we don’t have to worry about ink anymore. It works for almost everything. I’d consider it the default.
While copywriters and art directors don’t need to know about style books, it helps to know about these styles so that your work doesn’t look sloppy or unprofessional. This is especially important because editors and proofreaders are being phased out more and more every year.
This is similar to what happened to the typographer role. The role got absorbed into a graphic designer. We went through a rough phase where designers didn’t know how to type smart quotes, and any ads with straight quotes looked instantly cheap.
I’m more concerned about the awkward sentence fragment in your post.
The post is about typographic editing, not grammar.
Typography used to be handled by typographers and editors. How many dedicated typographer and editor roles exist at your agency?
Who should absorb typographic editing, art directors or copywriters?
Is “…” an ascii character? That’s dumb
Extended ASCII, not regular ASCII, but this bowl doesn’t give a crap about that stuff. It’s in Unicode. The style book doesn’t recommend the ASCII code anyway, it recommends thin non-breaking spaces between each dot. Look at any book on your shelf and find an ellipsis treated that way. Also, look at magazines like the New Yorker, Time Magazine, the Atlantic, etc.