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Foreign English?

5/12/2010

2 Comments

 
Posted by Jon
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…​
2 Comments
Jennifer Siler
3/25/2016 04:32:30 pm

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.

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Improving your writing skills | The Proposal Guys
3/25/2016 04:32:42 pm

[...] 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 [...]

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