This week as I was reading in the Associated press style book, I was going over the punctuation guide on pages 426-437, I learned something (which is very helpful for me in particular) that I did not realize or understand before. What I learned, was that when using commas, you need to follow some guidelines. The guidelines that I learned were that clarity is one of the biggest rules. If a comma does not help make clear of what is being said, then it should not be there. I also learned that you need to put a comma before the concluding conjunction in a series if something in the series requires a conjunction. For example, “I went to the gym, showered, had breakfast, and brushed my teeth and put on my shoes.”
A bad editing mistake that I found this week, was when I was at work and I was reading over some resumes. I was trying to fix up and make resumes more uniform with each other (all of the engineers at my work need to have an up to date resume on file, but not all of them are on the same template so I was just going through and making some edits). Anyways, I noticed that within the resumes there were lists of certifications and each line was different. On one line, it went like this…
“xxxx, xxxx: xxxx,” then on the next one it went “xxxx; xxxx; xxxx” and other one was “xxxx; xxxx: xxxx;”. It was very confusing and very wrong. All of them were different with their punctuation. The correct way would have needed to be commas to split up the sequence of listed items, and it also needed to be in sync and formatted all the same. It was incorrect and got changed very quickly once I saw that! I do not have a picture of it, but it was just something that I noticed in my typical day to day work.
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