![]() ► Do not put punctuation at the end of your collection, series, subseries, or folder titles. ( These notes pertain to typing information into an Excel sheet or ArchivesSpace) ► If using an acronym and pluralizing it, make it a small ‘s’ and don’t use an apostrophe. Example: Florida Economic Development Council (FEDC) If you have a series title that has an acronym, make certain that you include the full name in the series title, in addition to the acronym. ► Use acronyms sparingly: With electronic finding aids, researchers may jump to a portion of the finding aid without reading all of the notes. (note the use of periods in these)Īcronyms: Do not use acronyms without describing them fully the first time they are used. (Washington, D.C.) (note the use of periods in these) Please write out state names if possible. ► & = and (except for instances where the ampersand is part of a business name or similar, such as AT&T, Florida A&M University) ![]() ► misc = miscellaneous (try to avoid this word unless the rest of your title or series is more descriptive) All rights reserved.Try not to use abbreviations - few are absolutely standardized and it is best to avoid possible ambiguities.Ĭommon words and abbreviations you may not think about: Carillo in the Jissue of The Manila Times, © 2015 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. They should enable you to confidently navigate “only” in your written and spoken English. Our only defense against this ambiguity and semantic mischief is what linguists call disambiguating qualifiers, or additional statements designed to clarify our meaning and eliminate ambiguity.Ĭheck out the prescriptions and caveats discussed in my essay, “How to avoid semantic bedlam in the usage of the word ‘only’,” as posted in the Forum. Both of you are just victims of the treacherousness of the word “only” as the ultimate floating quantifier, capable of creating so much ambiguity and semantic mischief if we are not careful in using or positioning it in our statements. Neither you nor the band leader was at fault in that faux pas, though. It looks like it was the frame of mind you brought to the exchange that was logically faulty, and that having been the case, you wouldn’t have appreciated the correctness of the band leader’s answer even if you had asked the alternative question that you suggested, “Are all the members sons only?” (which, by the way, is syntactically flawed and even more confusing). ![]() ![]() This is why I’m almost sure that the band leader understood you perfectly and gave you a perfectly clear, unambiguous answer. The problem is that when you asked your question, you presumed that by naming their band “Sons of _,” they meant to say that they are “all only sons”-in Tagalog “lahat kaisang-isang anak na lalaki sa pamilya”-when, from all indications, they actually meant they were all sons of whatever occupational word it is that completes the phrase “Sons of _,” like, say, “Sons of OFWs” or “Sons of Great Sailors.” ![]() “Should I have asked ‘Are all the members sons only?’ so the band leader wouldn’t have misunderstood me?”įrom how you relate your conversation with that band leader, you did ask the right question, “Are all the members only sons?” and he did answer you correctly if indeed he said something to this effect, “I’m the only son in our group the other three have siblings.” “I wanted to find out if all of the four members of a Filipino band in our place are single men because they named themselves ‘Sons of _,’ so I asked the band leader, ‘Are all the members only sons?’ He replied that he’s the only son in their group, and that the other three have siblings. Still on the subject of faulty modification, a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum who goes by the username Miss Mae asked this question: To be grammatically aboveboard, therefore, lawyers should write: “All the parties are ordered to submit their respective memoranda” or “All the parties are ordered to submit their respective memorandums.” I’ll go as far as saying that if the many court decisions you’ve read consistently used the singular “memorandum” premodified by “respective,” the justices or judges who wrote them had been grammatically wrong all these years. It is therefore grammatically faulty for the singular “memorandum” to be preceded by “respective.” On the other hand, the plural “memoranda” and its plural variant “memorandums” can both be premodified by “respective.” ![]()
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