Tying up loose ends on a few things.

How should I approach capitalizations on these things below?

See these instances (I'm talking about Sri Lanka...note that "Professor at York University" looks weird but that's how her webpage does it even though you would lean toward lowercase on that front...and note that "parliament" might be a general common noun thing or might refer to Sri Lanka's specific parliament, so that's tough because the latter seems to take a capital letter on Wikipedia):

The protests reached a fever pitch on 9 July—protestors occupied government buildings, broke into the president’s residence, and called on the president to resign once and for all.

As Acting President, Ranil labeled the protestors “fascists” and called protestors a threat to democracy—this was an ironic statement from Ranil, since he insisted on remaining Acting President in sharp contrast to what the majority of Sri Lankans wanted.

On 20 July 2022, the Members of Parliament willfully ignored the demands of the people and voted to make Ranil president for the remainder of Gotabaya’s term—Gotabaya’s term ends in 2024.

Jennifer Hyndman is a professor at York University—she points out the following about Sri Lanka’s neoliberal policies

To give you a sense of how unpopular Ranil is, he wasn’t even elected to parliament in the 2020 elections—he actually lost his seat in 2020.

he actually lost his seat in 2020, but he was able to appoint himself to parliament through the national list. [two issues in bold here]

has a master’s degree in global affairs

The issue here ("the projects were supposed to generate tax revenue and help modernize Sri Lanka, but the projects failed") was simply whether something can be said to "help generate tax revenue".

For example, you might say that he "raised funds for the project"...how is that semantically different from saying that he "helped raise funds for the project"? The latter specifies that there are multiple people raising funds and not just the person in question, but what other semantic difference is there?

Everyone knows that these projects wouldn't be the sole thing generating tax revenue in Sri Lanka, so therefore it's not clear what "help generate tax revenue" means as distinct from "generate tax revenue".

Syntactically, is there anything wrong with the below construction? I know that the sentence's content is weird (How can laundering money ever be legal?) but I'm strictly asking about the syntax:

https://join.substack.com/p/is-trump-a-criminal

It’s important to understand that there are very fine lines—Donald has laundered money, but a lot of people have laundered money all over the United States and a lot of that laundering is actually legal.

It looks awkward how you have the "but...actually legal" chunk.

It's like this:

X, but Y and Z.

@Andrew Van Wagner posted:

1: So I should say "anytime" (one word) in this example? https://thegrammarexchange.inf.../topic/is-anytime-ok

2: So I shouldn't hyphenate "well-liked" in "is very well-liked"? https://thegrammarexchange.inf...t-is-very-well-liked

3: So I should hyphenate "special-interest groups"? https://thegrammarexchange.inf...cial-interest-groups

4: Should I stylize this (https://www.facebook.com/groups/344625605648650) with a lowercase "In"? I usually put titles into this (https://capitalizemytitle.com/style/NYTimes) in order to see how to capitalize titles.

5: Should I add a comma to "2900" when I say that the Facebook group has "2900" members? So should it be "2,900 members"? Apparently there's vacillation on this front.

Hi, Andrew—I've already answered (1), (2), and (3). Regarding (4), prepositions are not capitalized in titles unless the title (or subtitle) begins with a preposition. Regarding (5), either way is fine, but be consistent in a given piece of writing.

Thanks! Is there any way to tag people to get them to come to a thread and help? That other guy is always really amazing and I'd love to get his help in this thread as well!

What is your take on my issues with capitalization that I raised? Sorry for posting a lot of those; there were quite a few in my Sri Lanka piece that I posted above in this thread.

I feel like I should pay you guys for your amazing help; I really do bug you guys a lot so I feel guilty.

Hi, Andrew—There are several problems with your thread here, which does not comply with at least two Grammar Exchange guidelines.

1. "Tying up loose ends on a few things" is not a grammar topic.
2. There is no unifying grammar topic to the thread; you have asked about seven or eight entirely separate topics in this thread. Were we to discuss all of them in depth, the fruits of our labor would be extremely chaotic and of little value to anyone browsing through the forum. I don't like wasting my time. As you know, we do not earn a single penny here.
3. I have already answered questions (1), (2), and (3). The addition of "should" is needless. I have told you about the grammar. You can decide for yourself whether or not to err. Most people would choose not to make mistakes, but it's really up to you.

That is why I was rather brief and dismissive in my first reply above. I could have just closed the thread. Perhaps that is what I should have done.

Thanks; sorry about that!

Do you know a forum where you can pay people to help with little detailed things about syntax and punctuation that aren't really of general interest to someone browsing a forum? A lot of my stuff is incredibly specific to my pieces; it has nothing to do with anyone else's interests unless they're OCD like me.

@Andrew Van Wagner posted:

Do you know a forum where you can pay people to help with little detailed things about syntax and punctuation that aren't really of general interest to someone browsing a forum? A lot of my stuff is incredibly specific to my pieces; it has nothing to do with anyone else's interests unless they're OCD like me.

I actually think many of your questions may be interesting to people visiting the forum—perhaps not to the ESL-learner and ESL-teacher population, which this forum mainly serves, but to our native-speaking members, along with the handful of non-native-speaking members here who are nearing mastery.

It would be great if you could simply try to thematize your questions by considering them from a grammar-reference standpoint and giving them related titles. For example, if your question concerns ambiguity, you could use "Is this ambiguous?" as the title. It can be as simple as that.

Many of your questions relate to editing. While, normally, that would be a violation of G.E. guidelines, I have been, and continue to be, willing to make an exception for you, since I can honestly say I enjoy helping you edit. I love editing when someone already writes well and simply needs help polishing.

As to your regular citation of quotations from the New York Times archives, I can understand why you like to do that. However, please understand that I will always find stylistic inconsistencies in the NYT unpersuasive as a counterargument against a given punctuation principle.

Also, please understand that punctuation, though part of grammar, lies at the most superficial end and has mainly to do with stylistic conventions, which are relative not only to where one lives (British conventions differ from American ones) but also to where one writes. There is such a thing as "house style."

Thanks so much! I really appreciate these kind words!

To clarify, I need some means of adjudicating various things (like whether to hyphenate "nonprofessional"...I just dealt with that today); the NYT has a massive archive that's so easily searchable, so it's very tempting to use the NYT as my basic way to adjudicate things.

And it's neat how you can narrow the time field to "within the past year" and see the latest style moves over at the NYT; you will often find a certain hyphenation or stylistic move that shows up like 1000 times in their full archive but that's complete extinct or nearly extinct if you narrow things to the past year. So you can see the changes over time; they're pushing toward less and less hyphenation, for example, so that's an example of a push toward a very spare and efficient and minimalist style.

Of course, sometimes it's not 70/30 on a given matter at the NYT but it's instead more like 60/40 or 50/50...that's when I hesitate.

But of course the NYT is not an authority on anything; it's just a way to adjudicate and remain sane...without it everything would be so much more chaotic for me.

Two other things.

1: I often agree with the logical underpinning of a given NYT decision...for example, I think text looks better and reads better with minimal hyphenation.

2: I definitely do defer to the NYT a bit...they're a fancy newspaper and you have to assume that there are brilliant minds over there thinking away about various things.

The bold is an example where I decided to go against NYT practice:

https://join.substack.com/p/no-room-for-conflict

The US blocks NWFZs because the US wants to maintain nuclear-weapons facilities in the areas where the NWFZs are being proposed.

@Andrew Van Wagner posted:

To clarify, I need some means of adjudicating various things (like whether to hyphenate "nonprofessional"...I just dealt with that today); the NYT has a massive archive that's so easily searchable, so it's very tempting to use the NYT as my basic way to adjudicate things.

Yes, I completely understand. I sometimes consult the NYT, too, though I more often consult the New Yorker when I want to see whether the best punctuators have punctuated something how I have determined it "should" be punctuated.

As to hyphenated word forms, I recommend that you consult dictionaries, too. Regarding nonprofessional/non-professional, there is a British–American difference: the British use the hyphen (O.E.D.); Americans don't (Webster's).

@Andrew Van Wagner posted:

Two other things.

1: I often agree with the logical underpinning of a given NYT decision...for example, I think text looks better and reads better with minimal hyphenation.

2: I definitely do defer to the NYT a bit...they're a fancy newspaper and you have to assume that there are brilliant minds over there thinking away about various things.

Yes, yes. It is fun and often illuminating to speculate as to the logical underpinnings of a punctuational decision made by high-caliber editors.

I have observed a tendency toward minimal hyphenation, even among linguists, who, for example, tend to write "phrase structure rules" rather than "phrase-structure rules." I have long been comfortable with using the latter formulation, however, and see no need to change my ways, even though it is hard to see how anyone could interpret "phrase structure rules" otherwise than as "phrase-structure rules."

The less likely a misinterpretation, the less needed the hyphen.

@Andrew Van Wagner posted:

The bold is an example where I decided to go against NYT practice:

https://join.substack.com/p/no-room-for-conflict

The US blocks NWFZs because the US wants to maintain nuclear-weapons facilities in the areas where the NWFZs are being proposed.

Good choice. Without the hyphen, not only is it possible to construe "nuclear" as modifying "facilities" rather than "weapons," but it is also possible to misread the sentence, for a split second, as saying that the U.S. wants to maintain nuclear weapons, before one realizes that "nuclear weapons" modifies another word.

Thanks for this wonderful and nice comment!

Regarding punctuation, I sometimes like the New Yorker but sometimes find it stuffy and silly and objectionable; to take a random example, they do a weird thing where they put an umlaut over something like "coordination".