<center> # English with some of the silly rules removed *Originally published 2019-05-24 on [docs.sweeting.me](https://docs.sweeting.me/s/blog).* A.k.a saner linter rules for english grammar and syntax. </center> --- I've noticed that whenever I'm in a coding context and I write notes or draft up blog posts, I revert to a model of English that's closer to how I model programming language syntax. Changing a few linter rules for English in my personal notes is just my laziness to more closely match the internal model, but if other people are also annoyed, we should spread these patches and push English towards the next major version with fixes for these flaws. **The list:** [TOC] **The process for patching English:** 1. write it however you want 2. if other people like it, they follow suit 3. ??? 4. profit --- #### Punctuation and quote nesting order Wtf, who the hell designed this, the nesting order is completely wrong. I'm not quoting the end of their sentence, I'm quoting someone in my sentence, "then ending it"! **Bad:** `When quoting someone "saying something."` **Better:** `When quoting someone "saying something".` Most programmers I know fix this behavior in English subconciously, but it's worth explicitly writing and spreading, because it's particularly egregious and painfully obvious to fix. #### List item splitting precedence with "and", and no Oxford comma When writing lists of items, like `this, this, and this`, the `and` isn't necessary to demarcate the end of the list. In fact, it usually makes it harder to tell when you're intending two separate list items, or two things joined by `and` sharing one list slot. We can fix it by making oxford commas mandatory, and remove the trailing "and" requirement. All the list items become unambiguously bucketed, even if they contain multiple sub-items joined with `and`. **Bad:** `It's hard to tell with multiple ands: this item, that item and some other item and the last item.` **Better:** `It's hard to tell with multiple ands: this item, that subitem and some other subitem, the last item.` #### New sentence capitalization First letter capitalization for new sentences is syntatically unecessary to understand the sentence, and it doesn't help disambiguate any scenarios around `.` use because the `.` + trailing space already makes it clear. Why don't we just remove this requirement? **Bad:** `Why does every new sentence. Have to start with a capital letter.` **Better:** `doesn't the period. make it clear enough. that a sentence is over?` I'm ok with capitalization in titles, proper nouns, acronyms, etc, because in those cases it's useful to signal a greater importance, I just think it's unecessary for paragraph-format prose. This rule is probably contentious, so I leave it up to the user to enable it via local config. #### Suggest more via Twitter! https://twitter.com/thesquashSH/status/1131808693744492544 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime - https://docs.monadical.com/s/ask-stupid-questions