Australian Government Style Manual
stylemanual.gov.au
stylemanual.gov.au
I understand that this is mostly a reference text, and few people will read it cover to cover, but I still think that "show me the next piece of contents" is an operation that should be supported natively.
Journalists and particularly paper editors (he was deputy editor in chief of a famous magazine owned by the now defunct Federal Publishing) in the 80s and 90s.
He and other editors had to adhere to it in overly government focused articles (not necessarily for propaganda, moreso for consistency)
I truly believe there were no soft power intentions behind this sort of thing, it was difficult to find these particular resources pre-internet so they were essential pre late-90s
https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conve...
> A defining phrase is essential to the meaning of the sentence. The following examples show how the Oxford comma can affect meaning, using the defining phrase ‘for stockfeed’.
Seems like it provides a clear cut framework for when to use it?
- Do not ever use the Oxford comma.
- BTW, in case you don't know what an Oxford comma is, here are all the reasons why the Oxford comma is great.
They do this in other places too.
But putting that aside, the issue is not whether the Oxford Comma is preferred: it's what this website is actually instructing bureaucrats to do.
- code https://github.com/govau/design-system-site - sunset announcement https://web.archive.org/web/20210816211041/https://community... - reasoning (cant say I actually understand, beyond, the government is shifting focus) https://web.archive.org/web/20210624054249/https://www.legis...
Seems it lasted from about 2017 to 2021. Shame.
hooDOOdooDOOdoodle hooDOOdooDOOdoodle
> Double quotation marks aren’t Australian Government style. Use them only for quotations within quotations.
My partner is a(n Australian) copy writer. She’s converted me to the following rule:
- If it’s a direct quote — some human uttered the words — it goes in “double quotes”.
- Any other thing that is quote-like, but not words that an individual human actually said, goes in ‘single quotes’.
Before the age of widespread international computer-mediated communication, authorities generally agreed on a rule of starting with one and alternating to the other for quotations within quotations. Many agreeing that starting with single quotation marks was the U.K. rule and starting with double quotation marks was the U.S. rule; with the U.K. switching to double quotation marks for quotations within quotations and the U.S. switching to single.
One U.K. authority that I have from 1985 describes U.K. use of double quotation marks in primary position as "fighting a rearguard action" in the U.K., with only The Times sticking to it. Everyone else used single quotation marks primarily, back then.
However, the influence of CMC has put a lot of pressure on the then U.K. habit. Today, after decades of Usenet, Fidonet, the World Wide Web, et al., the top articles on BBC News (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66007017) and The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/24/wagner-troops-...) use double quotation marks, and the pendulum has very much swung the other way, with the U.K. norm of the 1970s now being the rare exception.
However, the rule of switching for quotations within quotations still holds, and headlines quite often still use single quotation marks, even though article bodies will use double ones for the same quotation. This latter is observably the case on the BBC News and Guardian sites right now, to use the same examples.
An interesting question to ask, and a harder one to answer is: what kind of quotation marks did people use in handwriting at different points in history? I'm not totally sure about this, but I think there's a long tradition of people in Britain using double quotation marks in hardwriting, in particular, for school. So I suspect that there is a long tradition of the choice of quotation mark being context-dependent. So using single marks in books but double marks in newspapers isn't as strange as it might seem.
Transitive verbs use the example, 'A director buys his lunch' to show that the action passes to the object.
It makes no sense. Did the lunch buy itself?
The page introduces an intransitive rule to cover up all the cases in English where subject-verb-noun generates sentences where there the noun ending is not involved in the verb.
The guide overloads the meaning of the English word 'mood' to carry all the intended meaning of the speaker. You are literally ordered around by a 'mood' in this style guide.
More loveless, heartless, unrecognizable clone work from the AU gov.
https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/blog/transitive-and-intransit...
'buy' is the action, 'director' is the subject, 'lunch' is the object.
<subject> <verbs> <object>
is the typical transitive verb template, a transitive verb connects a subject and object (whereas other verbs don't require an object).
I went to the source to find the context and linked it here for others, but it hasn't (for mysellf at least) shed any light on what they were objecting to.
The Aus Gov style guide states a transitive verb is when the action of the verb "passes" from the subject to the direct object. That makes no sense.
The man performing the action is a 'subject' and through some unexplained nonsensical magic, the action passes into 'his lunch', when he buys it.
As if the lunch could perform it's own actions, or could receive a man as a subject.
In reality a bag of chips is just an inaminate object and cannot 'host' verbs. The man buying the chips is the source of the verb and retains the ownership of the verb, like wikipedia states.
So did the lunch buy itself?
Perhaps not to you.
The verb action is from the subject to the object .. it transitions directionly as does current through a diode.
> So did the lunch buy itself?
No. It's odd that you'd even think that.
You can't just keep saying "it goes to" without explaining what "going to" is.
The ennui this generates is palpable. You'd think programmers get this easily.
* a native British speaker,
* a native Australian speaker,
* the staff of an Australian Government body tasked with improving language usage.
Perhaps it's something about yourself and your background exposure to English that's at issue here.
The wiki article states that they are an expression of attitude and modality.
The Aus gov style guide states the mood conveys meaning.
The top-down imposition of meaning via a mood, forces the intent of the speaker into the listener, simply because they have that mood.
Leaving a grammatical mood as an attitude of the speaker, is much more desirable. Relating to grammatical moods as an attitude leaves open the door to possible changes in the relationship.
Moods conveying meaning, does not.