A brief aside for translators: if the author has italicized something merely to emphasize that it’s borrowed from English, there’s no need to take that formatting across!
Category Archives: Punctuation
English as she is spoken
The Dutch are great communicators who get their message across well in spoken English. But actually putting the spoken word on paper is a pig with a different snout altogether.
South America, West Africa, North Korea
None of these take a hyphen in English. Simple.
Arithmetic
Hold on, that’s the same in all languages… isn’t it?
Accents for emphasis
Adding acute accents to the vowels of a word to signifiy that it should be emphasized is a purely Dutch typographical convention.
Brackets for alternatives
“A five-point scale of (strongly) disagree, neutral, (strongly) agree.” That makes no sense in English, where brackets add detail rather than expressing alternatives.
Comma splices
Separate sentences shouldn’t be glued together with commas, this is poor style.
Ellipsis and so forth…
Using three dots – an ellipsis – to mean “et cetera” isn’t normal English punctuation.
New speaker, new line
If your text is to flow naturally, typographical conventions need to be observed as well. It’s not just about getting the wording right.
Propagating initial capitals
Where sentences don’t start with a capital for some reason, there’s no need to propagate the need for one until you find somewhere to put it.
