Bit miffed!

mattlins

I entered a Facebook comp which asked you to describe in one sentence what your bracelet means to you. Took me forever to condense it down to one sentence only to find the winners had written a paragraph!
I pm'd the company and was told that "one sentence" was just a figure of speech and they would send me a jewellery box as a gesture of goodwill. pah! Not quite the £100 voucher I'd entered for:(

starrybee

You may not have won either way and for them to send you a jewellery box is pretty good of them imo.

dc64

It sounds like you came out very well. Good gesture from the company.:)

MaineBlue

Yeah, that's really nice of them.

Although I agree that one sentence should actually mean one sentence rather than a paragraph.

MaineBlue

chrissie57 wrote: »

Not particularly nice of them; they set their T&C then happily broke them, then when challenged came out with 'A sentence is just a figure of speech':rotfl:

More like they were caught out and are offering a bribe to OP to go away. Not a smallish firm with a local winner by any chance?:cool:

Not really sure how you can quote the Ts & Cs without even knowing what the comp was or who the company was.

They've no need to offer anything to anyone who didn't 'win'. So, yeah, I say it's nice of them.

mjm3346

If they didn't bother with punctuation or just removed any full stops from the paragraph they would be the legitimate winner as you can just go on and on and on for as long as you like as it is not a very good idea to limit something to just one sentence, and it would make a lot more sense to set a limit on the number of words than to say there should only be just one little sentence as while some people may stick to what is commonly considered to be a reasonable sentence there will be others who happily decide that something so ambiguous as a one sentence limit can quite simple be ignored as there is nothing to say the "sentence" needs to be in any way grammatically correct and they can just keep going on and on for as long as they can be bothered to keep writing.

MaineBlue

^^^^ What mjm3346 said

gojoroan2007

I still remember reading this 20+ years ago and googling it now, reading it again and still enjoying it, I think it stands the test of time.....

Notes on Punctuation

by Lewis Thomas*


[SIZE=+2]T[/SIZE]here are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavour of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity )))))))))))).

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows in all sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn't realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.

I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; to read on; it will get clearer.

Colons are a lot less attractive for several reasons: firstly, they give you the feeling of being rather ordered around, or at least having your nose pointed in a direction you might not be inclined to take if left to yourself, and, secondly, you suspect you're in for one of those sentences that will be labelling the points to be made: firstly, secondly and so forth, with the implication that you haven't sense enough to keep track of a sequence of notions without having them numbered. Also, many writers use this system loosely and incompletely, starting out with number one and number two as though counting off on their fingers but then going on and on without the succession of labels you've been led to expect, leaving you floundering about searching for the ninethly or seventeenthly that ought to be there but isn't.

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

Quotation marks should be used honestly and sparingly, when there is a genuine quotation at hand, and it is necessary to be very rigorous about the words enclosed by the marks. If something is to be quoted, the exact words must be used. If part of it must be left out because of space limitations, it is good manners to insert three dots to indicate the omission, but it is unethical to do this if it means connecting two thoughts which the original author did not intend to have tied together. Above all, quotation marks should not be used for ideas that you'd like to disown, things in the air so to speak. Nor should they be put in place around clich!s; if you want to use a clich! you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society. The most objectionable misuse of quotation marks, but one which illustrates the danger of misuse in ordinary prose, is seen in advertising, especially in advertisements for small restaurants, for example "just around the corner," or "a good place to eat." No single, identifiable, citable person ever really said, for the record, "just around the corner," much less "a good place to eat," least likely of all for restaurants of the type that use this type of prose.

The dash is a handy device, informal and essentially playful, telling you that you're about to take off on a different tack but still in some way connected with the present course — only you have to remember that the dash is there, and either put a second dash at the end of the notion to let the reader know that he's back on course, or else end the sentence, as here, with a period.

The greatest danger in punctuation is for poetry. Here it is necessary to be as economical and parsimonious with commas and periods as with the words themselves, and any marks that seem to carry their own subtle meanings, like dashes and little rows of periods, even semicolons and question marks, should be left out altogether rather than inserted to clog up the thing with ambiguity. A single exclamation point in a poem, no matter what else the poem has to say, is enough to destroy the whole work.

The things I like best in T.S. Eliot's poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.

Commas can't do this sort of thing; they can only tell you how the different parts of a complicated thought are to be fitted together, but you can't sit, not even to take a breath, just because of a comma,
* From The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979:103-6).