Lose vs Loose

[boingboing (imported)]

No. You use a comma before each item in a series and before the retained conjunction. The notion that you do not use a comma before the conjunction (especially and) was devised by teachers of remedial writing to teach the uneducated to distinguish between and in a series (Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry are hopeless losers) from the conjunction that joins a compound sentence (Mitt Romney will not appeal to religious bigots, and Ron Paul needs to take his thorazine). Competent writers follow the MLA Handbook of Style, Fowler's Modern English Usage, and even Strunk and White's Elements of Style, all of whom recommend the comma before the series conjunction.

Although I myself always use the serial comma, and prefer when others do as well, the situation is not quite as clear-cut as you suggest. See the Wikipedia page on the serial comma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma) for a bit of info on the controversy. To put it another way, you are obviously right but also certainly wrong.

[kristoff]

Although I myself always use the serial comma, and prefer when others do as well, the situation is not quite as clear-cut as you suggest. See the Wikipedia page on the serial comma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma) for a bit of info on the controversy. To put it another way, you are obviously right but also certainly wrong.

You're quoting Wikipedia, which almost certainly guarantees a much higher incidence of error.

[Paolo]

We were always taught that you could use the comma at the last thing in a list if you wanted to.

Therefore, none of us did!

[Dave (imported)]

Commas in a list?

"a,b,c,d, and e" or "a,b,c,d and e"

I've had 30 short stories accepted for publication in the past year and no editor complains about this. I leave the comma out (That is my second example)

BUT, I have some journals and ezines that ask for particular formats and punctuations in their Submission Requirements and I go back and do whatever they want.

If an editor wants it, I change my manuscript for them. If an editor has no listing then there is a "standard" format that I use that seems to be a publishing industry standard. That was double-spaced, Courier New, 12point, 1 inch margins, double spaced, page number optional but if you have it, upper right.

The reason for that was that it gets about 250 words on a page and in the day and age of snail mail submissions, the number of words in a manuscript could be estimated easily. Novels are 80K to 100K words (320 to 400 sheets) and when an agent or editor read that manuscript double spacing gave room for comments.

Now we deal with electronic formats and word counting, so it's usually some variation of: 12 point font, single-spaced, no spaces between paragraphs, and half-inch tab indentations.

Then what happens is that the editor has a grammar checker or a copy editor that changes all the punctuation and spellings to what they want in heir magazine.

They reject for lots of spelling and grammar errors.

They reject almost any font other than 12 point Courier, or Times New Roman. Sometimes I see Georgia, I never see Arial or Verdana as a requested font.

And then there are word limits:

Under 350 words is something new on the internet and you have to figure it out. This short is too hard for me to be satisfactory.

Flash Fiction 500 to 1000 words. Rarely, 1500 words for flash but that is typically erotica.

short story - 100/1500 to 7000/9000. Most short stories fall between 2000 and 5000 words. It really does come down to can the reader finish the story in the time it takes for a dump (to borrow a joke from the THE BIG CHILL)

ambiguous length: 9000/12000 words -- good luck. Not too many anthologies are open to this length of story. Longest story I have in print is 12K. It was a murder mystery and required four "acts"...

Novella: 15,000 up to about 50K

Young Adult novel: between 40K and 60K

Adult novel: 80K to 100K

That's some things that might help all this confusion.

I do understand that the existing stories already exist and that's that. You all are doing a good job on the archive.

[Dave (imported)]

I had an additional comment:

Most editors say "I only accept texts as an RTF File attached to an email" ... and they simply do not open other attachments.

Some flash fiction ezines (because of the brevity of the format) will accept text in an email but most want the attached file and some form of cover letter.

And by the way, I sign contracts with terms and such, legally enforceable contracts that specify my rights as author and the editor's rights as publisher. I am at the point of not submitting to anyone that doesn't present a contract because of the unreliability issues involved. But those are my sob stories.

[george2u2 (imported)]

I've been using spell checkers for longer than some of these kids have been alive.

I can't recall the one before the wang, other than it used North Atlantic Phillips cassettes, Which was newer than the vari-typer, that had punch tapes for the boilerplate paragraphs. Of course these were improvements over my 19th century Corona folding portable, IBM's famous model C or Remington s Selectric (Most people didn't realize it wasn't IBM s but a Remington Arms patent)

My trouble with spell checkers is they don't know a board from a broad. They just know that the sequence of letter is in the dictionary.

It's kind of like the Electric Dishwashers the wife has had. Not one of them ever wiped a counter top or cleared the table.

[Richard_Less (imported)]

I stumbled upon this pic that suits this thread (or should I say 'which suites this thread'?):

[gellyfregy (imported)]

They reject almost any font other than 12 point Courier, or Times New Roman. Sometimes I see Georgia, I never see Arial or Verdana as a requested font.

Of course, it is their zine or publication, so they can specify whatever fonts they like. I'd point out that the sans serif fonts (Arial) are most often found to be easier on the eyes on a typical computer screen, whereas the serif fonts (Times) are found to be easier to read when printed on paper. That's "in general" (user testing), but of course YMMV, and I'm definitely a fan of letting the end user (or in this case, the editor) choose what format is easiest on their eyes, rather than setting it in stone.

At any rate, unless one is doing something unusual, there shouldn't be a lot of style changes in a story, other than the occasional italic or bold, and maybe centering. So it should be relatively easy to reformat the story to meet whatever the publisher wants. That should include changing the base font from Courier to Times or back again. I realize that some word processing programs make this harder than it should be, but that's one reason I try to stay away from them for fiction, at least until it comes time to do a special format for printing on paper.

Anyone else use one of those dedicated writer's programs, like DarkRoom or FocusWriter?

[Dave (imported)]

What happens is that a writer learns to write and edit in the most commonly desired style.

AS you point out, it is an editor's ezine and they get what they want.

BTW - I use Microsoft Word right now.

I might switch to one of the Apple products in the near future.

[rrammler42 (imported)]

Young germans (teens & twens) are using the word "loosers" quite often. It seems to sound cooler that "losers" or the german equivalent.... Strange? But true! Finis germaniae - once again