Friday, July 21, 2006

The lunacy has ended, the pies are baked, the peanut butter balls are dipped & in the freezer. Hooray for summer, wet swimsuits & cool houses (except for the kitchen.)

I once had this boss that spent several months trying to convince everyone that the punctuation in the above sentence's parenthesis was the correct way to do it. We kept telling her it was wrong, but she swore up and down that the period goes inside the parenthesis. We finally convinced her, but it took a lot of documentation because she considered herself an "expert" at grammar and always did the final edits on our newsletter because she was so "good" at it. ha! Funny the memories a little punctuation can bring back.

Actually I was just remembering how dang hot that office used to get with no air conditioning and how happy I am to not be commuting in a bus or non-airconditioned car. Sorry NEDA ladies, I miss you, but not the oven we used to work in, you must be miserable right now.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

When I was in journalism school they taught us that it goes inside the parenthesis because the AP style-book (the Bible of the NYT) said so???? But I remain confused and prepetually unsure...

PS Still looking forward to that salad tomorrow. :) Woo-Hoo... Bring Saben's swimsuit!

Kari said...

no way, I have never seen it that way ANYWHERE. Maybe I just never noticed, but we couldn't even find it that way on the internet anywhere. She thought she had just confused it with quotes, but maybe she was right all along....

Anonymous said...

Here's fuel for the fire, from Garbl's book of style used at CSU: Place a period outside a closing parenthesis if the material inside is not a sentence (such as this fragment). If a parenthetical sentence (here is one example) is part of a sentence, don't capitalize the first word or end the parenthetical sentence with a period. But if the parenthetical sentence ends with a question mark or exclamation point, put a period after the closing parenthesis (here's another example!). If the material in the parentheses is an independent sentence, capitalize the first word and place the period before the closing parenthesis. (Here is an example.)

Anonymous said...

Correction...sorry for the booboo, Garbl's is not used at CSU.