Hacker News Reader

Comment by zapzupnz | Hacker News Reader

> This is a great example of a place where you shouldn't use punc-quote formatting

There's no place where it should be used. It can only introduce ambiguities, never solve any.

Quote-punc, on the other hand, doesn't introduce any. What always drove me nuts in academic writing was the knowledge that no matter how well I chose to format my article, the publisher would always introduce punc-quote and wreck things.

I'd have to defensively write around the potential placement of a punctuation mark which is just insane.

View on HN

My former boss, a university professor, is a very good writer and leaning towards the anal side when it comes to things like punctuation, wording, spelling, etc. I remember we once worked on a journal article together that was edited somewhere in India. She sent in a pristine source file, and got back a print proof where literally tens of mistakes had been introduced. She corrected them meticulously, sent the corrected version back, and received another proof with another tens of errors introduced.

This went on for quite a while, you can only admire my boss's perseverance. However, what I don't understand is how these mistakes could have been introduced in the first place? It almost felt like someone on the other end was actually retyping all of her writing, or else how was it possible to get all of these mistakes in there?

Was there money involved? Perhaps it was a scam, or a failure to pay the right bribe.

Good call, but no, it was for an Elsevier journal.

Elsevier is a mixed bag. They bought up thousands of journals with not that much centralized oversight. They have a long history in publishing but as a subsidiary of an increasingly broad conglomerate (RELX) they sometimes show more interest in exploiting their reputation than maintaining it. That leads to things like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Fake_journals

Disclosure: I formerly worked for MDPI, a rival.

Thanks for this info. In my case, it was a renowned journal though.

So a scam then.

You know I set you up for that joke, right? :)

Yea Elsevier just finds whatever warm (free) body they can to edit.

Strongly agree. When the rules are bad, don't conform to them. I always use Quote-punc in my own writing if there is any possibility of ambiguity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com