User:Anditres

Hello world, I'm Andrew.

I'm somewhat of a pedant, and also a bit of a jack of all trades (or some, at least. But I do both numbers and words!). I'm a psychologist by education, and a proof-reader and translator by (semi)profession. Expecting to enter international trade just to confuse matters (training almost complete!). Paperwork can be surprisingly fun.

If anyone is interested in my opinions on punctuation, it will be whoever is reading my talk page, so here's why I don't fit neatly into half of the boxes I've put myself in:

First things first, my spoken/informal English is *extremely* colloquial, a proper thick London accent, going light only on the dialect words. I think it's too thick to count as Estuary; it probably does count as Multicultural London English. On sites like Wikipedia, as well as when writing long posts on other sites, I use a much more standard British English so that people from outside of London and the surrounding area don't get a headache trying to understand me (although admittedly it's not like I would drop Ts in writing anyway).

The passive voice is great for when the subject-agent is unknown and that includes in formal writing. Wikipedia, being an encyclopaedia, generally wants the most complete, unambiguous information available, making the passive voice somewhat less useful here...but it definitely has its uses.

Regarding splitting the infinitive and final prepositions, in formal contexts I avoid them, unless it is less ambiguous or sounds awful without the infinitive split or the preposition chucked to the end. But as a general rule, I try to make it unambiguous, natural sounding, with adverbs after verbs (yep, even if the verb isn't even in its full infinitive form, which I guess is just force of habit), and without terminal prepositions. Who/whom is a bit of an ongoing battle for me to be honest. When I only spoke English I didn't use whom, nor did I know how to use it...likewise with the subjunctive, outside of certain cases like "if I were you", which, to me, is about as indicative of standard/current subjunctive use in British English as the phrase "Adonde fueres, haz lo que vieres" is of future subjunctive use in Spanish - even if my therapist occasionally uses the future subjunctive in conversation...

Which/that is another intuition one for me. I write whatever I think is most likely to be understood correctly.

I prefer to use two spaces after a full stop. I hardly ever remember to do it, though, and consistency is more important, so I only *actually* do it when asked.

I could totally write my own style guide. Admittedly it would be relatively short, as so many things could be summed up by "1: Clarity. 2: Fluidity. 3: Consistency. 4: Correctness". That's not even to suggest that correctness should somehow be in "last" place: I'm more prescriptivist than most linguists would accept to be a valid stance, so it's a good thing I'm not a linguist. I suppose this is where the pedantry comes in: correctness in use of language in formal settings is important to me, but those three other things are even more important.

I should probably point out that this isn't an attempt to create a weird soapbox about grammar, I might be a pedant but I'm not sure I would say I'm passionately pedantic. Just plain, vanilla pedantic. But I'm sure a load of my edits will involve these kinds of debates. Edits within the Wikipedia style guide, of course (although if you would like to change to the APA/BPS style guide, that would be fab as that's the one I have mostly memorised!)