Foreign English?
Although I’m travelling so extensively at the moment that it’s hard to get a moment to stop and think, I am beginning to really look forward to the APMP conference, which starts in Orlando in just a few weeks’ time.
As well as a session (“Proposal World”) from the main stage with BJ on the Thursday morning of the event, I’m presenting a slot on “The Excellent Executive Summary”. I submitted my final paper last week, and the good folks at APMP were kind enough to review it in detail.
They came back with the observation that they’d apparently found a “punctuation error”. The issue concerned was a box in which I’d used the phrase “e.g. RFP”, provoking them to observe:
there should be a comma after “e.g.” and before the RFP acronym, so it looks like “e.g.,”
This rather surprised me, so I thought I’d check it out. After all, if “e.g.” without a comma is incorrect, I’ve made proofreading errors in pretty much every document I’ve written over the years! And a reliable online source made for interesting reading:
For American English usage, you should always put a comma right after both “i.e.” and “e.g.”, as shown in the examples above. For British English usage, do not put a comma right after either “i.e.” or “e.g.”.
Well, I never knew that! I’m used to the fact that spellings are sometimes different on opposite sides of the pond – but I’d never picked up on this particularly subtle difference in punctuation.
Of course, were the APMP conference a US event, I’d clearly translate my material into American English. But it’s not – it’s an international event that happens to take place in the States, with an audience drawn from across the globe. As such, I think it’s more appropriate to present in my native language! Yet even that’s an interesting point for debate…
This article was written by Jon on 12 May, 2010 and filed under APMP & accreditation, Word play & writing. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
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That’s interesting and a little disturbing :) A far cry from the disastrous results of mixing up the definitions of “billion” on the different sides of the pond.
[...] my last post discussing one of the subtle differences between US and UK English, a reader dropped me an email asking about the “reliable online source” I’d used to check out [...]