Grammar questions.
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Draft:
Binary factors typically ask if something is good enough to meet some criterion, e.g. is this pet within my budget? Is this pet small enough for my kid to hold? Is this pet safe enough for my family? Is this pet cute in the opinions of all of my children? Binary factors can also consider if something fits in a category or not, e.g. is it black? You can combine binary factors with “and”, e.g. is it cheap enough and also cute enough? You can also combine binary factors with “or”, e.g. is it black or orange?
I’m thinking the “e.g.” followed by an example question sentence is wrong. I could use a colon or quote marks but there are issues. I have more examples that are presented as just their own sentence which I want to be parallel, so if one gets a colon or quote marks then i think the others should too, which i don’t want to do.
It seems readable and understandable so maybe I should just leave it.
what about parentheses?
breaks parallelism unless i put multiple examples in a row within the same set of paren, which is bad cuz i don’t want to deemphasize the examples so much
For questions, I usually use italics, like:
We should ask: is that grammatical?
The colon here makes sense IMO.
In the case of a question after “e.g.” (and “i.e.”) apparently the “e.g.” should be followed by a comma (see last paragraph)[1], so the colon doesn’t work but the italics still do.
There are lots of good questions, e.g., is it grammatical?
I looked into how to write inline questions a little while ago, and from memory both quotes and italics are okay. As long as the question is differentiated from the parent clause. Italics felt more natural to me.
Edit: I don’t think I should have referenced this – it was just the first result on google when I searched for ‘comma after e.g. or not’. It wasn’t what I read when I searched before, but I didn’t look past one result. The second result has more opinions. ↩︎
I think the manner in which you referenced it was the issue, not referencing it per se. Like “apparently the “e.g.” should be followed by a comma” is a more certain framing than seems warranted - if you had said something more like “FWIW this site says you do it this way” that would have been better (better still if you had looked at multiple sources). Would be appealing less to the authority of the first google result.
Yeah, gp. I said in the footnote “I don’t think I should have referenced this” – ‘this’ being the object. But what I say afterwards isn’t about that specific thing (the doc): “it was just the first result on google”. I think at some level I knew that it was my method that was problematic (taking the short-cut to pseudo-authority) – but I wasn’t clear about that. Your example of an alternative (quoted below) points out (to me) that I was also dishonest about my own confidence and/or the research I did – I didn’t hedge but I should have.
I could have been totally honest instead, e.g., “WRT ‘e.g.’ and ‘i.e.’, I did some research earlier this year. What worked best for me is always adding a comma after both (e.g. this doc says always use commas), but there are other schools of thought too. This works well for me combined with a question+italics after ‘e.g.’ […]”
Justin’s alternative: