Missing hyphens

It's also incorrect to place a comma before and and but as they are conjunctions.

My friend finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog
Leaving out the punctuation can result in some very strange comments!

I am of a generation probably slightly younger than some of the other ladies posting on here, and we were never given formal grammar and spelling tuition, any appreciation of this fine art coming purely from whatever we read. However, I think I picked up enough to be justifiably irritated at predictive text 'correcting' my input, particularly when I know I'm right and the predictive text is wrong!

The 'Oxford' or 'series' comma is used before 'and' or 'or' when it comes before the last item in a series or list. There's been much controversy about it and I'd never mark a student wrong for forgetting this disputed rule.

I think punctuation is still important, the English language should be left alone thank you!

Oh lord.

MaizieD I'm so with you! I can't write "noone", like you I read them all as "OO" as if an owl is in the room.
The auto corrector sometimes puts it right if i'm hurrying but generally is more of a nuisance, changing words I've deliberately written a certain way!

I think it's more the result of texting than computers, because computer keyboards are very complex, whereas phone-screen keyboards are not, but I do agree about the cows' carers.

I get irritated by other printing issues — acronyms used to be all capitals but because that is more difficult on a smartphone, NATO has become Nato and other familiar sets of initials have become words, too. Is it because people speak their messages? I won't say 'they dictate' because if they did, they would need to express the punctuation

I am old enough to remember 66 and 99 for speech marks, but these are now universally shown in print as ' ' quotation marks. And quotes are sandwiched by those marks, too, which really causes confusion for dinosaurs like me.

Gabrielle. Well, blow me down. You live and learn. Thank you.

That’s you told, pensionpat

Not entirely true GabriellaG -at any rate not always

www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/learnit/learnitv258.shtml

(Ps sorted out “who’s “ and “whose” yet?

Thanks, Shinyredcar. I've never been sure of the difference between (") and (').

And how about whom?

Oooh. I've had a busy few days and it's so nice to come back to 'my' thread and find lots of responses

I find the lack of a hyphen in words like 'noone' and 'cooperate' particularly annoying because it makes reading even more difficult for people who struggle with the skill. English has a complex enough orthography to interpret without adding in more possible ways of pronouncing 'oo'. I used to work with children with reading difficulties so I suppose I'm extra sensitive to little problems like this.

I'm glad others find it irritating as well.

Maizie I’ve just come across a very good example of the importance of hyphens on another thread.
A poster wrote ‘super processed food’.
I’m quite sure, given the context, that she meant ‘over-processed food’ and not ‘really delicious processed food’.
But the absence of the hyphen did leave room for doubt.

An ellipsis has three dots. A dash is not the same as a hyphen. It is preferable to use ‘and’ instead of an ampersand in everyday writing.