Please provide a list of experts on the use of parentheses in the english language?

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Request for Question Clarification by journalist-ga on 31 Oct 2002 13:31 PST

Do you mean "experts" as in individual people or 'expert" as in the
Harbrace handbook reference?

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Clarification of Question by blcaslin-ga on 31 Oct 2002 14:54 PST

A person (university professor, professional grammarian, newspaper editor).

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Request for Question Clarification by haversian-ga on 31 Oct 2002 14:54 PST

How many experts are you looking for?

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Request for Question Clarification by kyrie26-ga on 31 Oct 2002 14:59 PST

Are you looking for an expert in punctuation because you want to ask
him or her a specific question? Would you be happy with an answer that
addressed your specific question, if I could prove that the source of
the answer is credible and expert-level?

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Clarification of Question by blcaslin-ga on 31 Oct 2002 15:22 PST

I'm looking for a reasonable list of experts -- at least a few, more
than a few if you can find them.

Responding to the second question, the goal is to find a live expert i
can contact and attempt to hire to explain the use of parentheses to a
jury.  two parties dispute what a "(s)" mean following a noun in a
contract.  for example take a look at the word "bike(s)" -- one side
says it means plural, more than one bike.  the other side says it
means alternative possibilities, could be one bike or could be more
than one bike.  Kenneth G. Wilson is one name I found on my own  --
see this page:  http://www.bartleby.com/68/19/4419.html -- but
unfortunately he is sick and unable to accept the position.

Hi blcaslin-ga, 

I’m glad you clarified what you were looking for. It gives me several
options to pursue in order to find just the right expert for you.

First of all, please understand that there is no such thing as a
“parentheses expert.”  People who are expert in punctuation (including
parentheses) would include writers, authors of textbooks on how to
write, book editors, long-time magazine and newspaper editors, English
or writing professors, and anyone else who writes or edits
professionally.

In fact, there are thousands of such experts who would be able to
explain proper usage and correctly interpret the meaning of
parentheses in terms a jury would understand.

What I have done for you is go through the many (275!) websites of
experts, writers, editors, and professors, and have gleaned out the
most useful for you. (There are plenty of people out there who profess
to be expert but really would not be suitable for your purpose.)

I’ve divided the experts into categories to make it easier for you to
see what their qualifications are. My recommendation is to work from
the top down. In my opinion (based on what I know about writing and
what I found online) the authors of the text books and style guides
would be your most qualified, followed by the magazine editors and
English professors, and finally the “other” people I’ve listed who
have websites relating to grammar and punctuation.

Where possible I have included contact information about the author or
expert I’ve referenced. Where I was unable to find personal contact
information, I have provided you with links to the publishers’
websites. You may contact the authors through them.


===================================
AUTHORS OF WRITERS /EDITORS TEXTS
===================================

There are many authoritative books on grammar, punctuation, and word
usage. The authors and editors of these books would be considered top
in their field. These authors and/or editors can be reached through
their publishers

-----------------------------------------

WORDS INTO TYPE
Marjorie E. Skillin, Robert Malcolm Gay
Publisher: Pearson PTP; ISBN: 0139642625; 3rd edition (June 1974)

PRENTICE HALL - PEARSON
http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/1,4096,0139642625,00.html


----------------------------------------------

CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE
by John Grossman (Preface)
Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd); ISBN: 0226103897; 14th
edition (September 1993)

This book is edited by a group of editors as University of Chicago
Press. They have their own website here:

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS – CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/

“The manuscript editing department at the University of Chicago Press
can respond only to questions related to The Chicago Manual of Style.
If you have a style question that is not answered here or in the
Manual, please submit it to cmosfaq@press.uchicago.edu


UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/

The University of Chicago Press
1427 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637 U.S.A.


EDITORIAL STAFF
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/authinfo.html#staff

Linda J. Halvorson
Editorial Director, Reference
Dictionaries, encyclopedias, guides, atlases, and other general
reference

Series: Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Complete/Series/CGWEP.html

----------------------------------------------------

EDITING FOR WRITERS
Lois Johnson Rew, San Jose State University

For upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level courses in Editing or
Copyediting, Professional or Technical Writing, Advanced Composition,
General, or Magazine Editing.

ISBN: 0-13-749086-0
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Copyright: 1999
Format: Paper; 470 pp
Published: 06/29/1998
http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/1,4096,0137490860,00.html

LOIS JOHNSON REW 
http://www.sjsu.edu/depts/english/construction.html


------------------------------------------

The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation 
Copyright © 1977-1998 by Jane Straus  MILL VALLEY, CA. USA.

JANE STRAUS
http://www.grammarbook.com/

Seminars by the author
Business English Review - An Update on Grammar, Punctuation, and Style

-------------------------------------

The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers

ABOUT THE BOOK
http://occawlonline.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/long_hairston_sfh_6/chapter0/deluxe.html

ABOUT THE AUTHOR - John Ruszkiewicz

John Ruszkiewicz is currently the Director of the Division of Rhetoric
and Composition at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has
taught writing and literature for twenty-four years. He is the author
or co-author of more than twenty books … He has served as the
President of the Conference of College Teachers of English of Texas of
Texas (1992–93) and has won two major teaching awards at UT–Austin.

John Ruszkiewicz
http://www.drc.utexas.edu/faculty/ruszkiewicz/

------------------------------------------

THE NEW ST MARTINS HANDBOOK
by Robert Connors, Andrea A. Lunsford
Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's; ISBN: 031216744X; (March 1999)


ANDREA A LUNSFORD
http://www.stanford.edu/~lunsfor1/

Andrea Lunsford, Professor of English and Director of Writing and
Critical Thinking
Department of English • Building 460 Stanford University• Stanford
She has written or coauthored thirteen books

ROBERT J CONNORS
Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. 

Mr. Connors is now deceased, however there is a writing center at U of
NH named for him and there are professional staff affiliated with the
center.

ROBERT J CONNORS WRITING CENTER - STAFF
http://www.unh.edu/writing/wacstaff.htm


-------------------------------

DIANA HACKER
http://www.dianahacker.com/

Diana Hacker, author of four best-selling handbooks, has been a
professor of English at Prince George's Community College in Maryland
for over thirty years.

THE BEDFORD HANDBOOK
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/hacker/bedhandbook/index.html

A WRITER’S REFERENCE
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/book.asp?2001003087


--------------------------------

WRITING; A CONCISE HANDBOOK
Heffernan, James W., and Lincoln, John E. 
(1997)   ISBN: (0-393-97093-0)

http://www.wwnorton.com/orders/wwn/097093.htm

James A. W. Heffernan
Professor of English, Dartmouth 
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~english/faculty/heffernan.html

-------------------------------------

THE BLAIR HANDBOOK – 2ND ED. 
By Toby Fulwiler and Alan R. Hayakawa
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbind/pubbooks/fulwiler/


TOBY FULWILER
Directs the writing program at the University of Vermont, where he
also teaches composition and literature courses.
http://www.heinemann.com/shared/authors/91.asp


UNIVERSITY OF VT – TOBY FULWILER
http://www.uvm.edu/~english/tfulwiler.html

-------------------------------------------

THE NEW CENTURY HANDBOOK
Christine A. Hult and Thomas N. Huckin

http://cwabacon.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/hult_ab/

Christine A. Hult 
Professor of English  
Associate Department Head  
At USU since 1985  

Office: 205 Ray B. West 
Phone: (435) 797-2735  
email: chult@english.usu.edu

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY – CHRISTINE A HULT
http://websites.usu.edu/english/Document/index.asp?Parent=638


Thomas Huckin, Ph.D.  
Ph.D.: University of Washington
Office: 3702 LNCO
Phone: (801) 581-7522
E-Mail: tomhuckin@attbi.com

UNIVERSITY OF UTAH – THOMAS HUCKIN
http://www.hum.utah.edu/english/faculty/huckin.html

--------------------------------------

The Ready Reference Handbook: Writing, Revising, Editing, 3/e 
by Jack Dodds -- William Rainey Harper College
Pearson education publishing

http://wps.ablongman.com/long_dodds_rrh_3/0,5006,308166-main,00.html
http://cwabacon.pearsoned.com/bookbind/pubbooks/dodds_ab/

About the Author  

Jack Dodds has an MA in English from the University of Iowa and a PhD
in English from Loyola University of Chicago. He has taught
composition and literature for more than thirty years … Throughout his
career, his professional interests have been the process of writing,
the influence of audience on that process, sentence stylistics, and
grammar.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR – JACK DODDS
http://wps.ablongman.com/long_dodds_rrh_3/0,5006,309163-,00.html



========================================
WORLD CLASS EDITORS
========================================

Anyone on this page would be expert in the field of punctuation: 

COPYEDITOR
http://www.copyeditor.com/copy/copy_bios.asp

especially either of the following  ---

BARBARA WALLRAFF

Barbara is the editor of Copy Editor. The author of the nationally
best-selling book Word Court, she is also a senior editor of The
Atlantic Monthly, where she writes the "Word Court" and "Word
Fugitives" columns.

NORM G GOLDSTEIN 
Norm Goldstein is a columnist at Copy Editor. The editor of The
Associated Press Stylebook, Norm has worked for the A.P. as a
reporter, editor, and author for more than 30 years.




============================================
PROFESSORS OF ENGLISH / GRAMMAR / WRITING
=============================================

Of course every university will have a professor of English who would
be able to help you. What I’ve done is provide you with the names of
those who have chosen to make themselves known to the public as expert
in their field.

----------------------------

Charles Darling
Professor English/Humanities
Capital Community College
Comprehensive coverage of grammar, punctuation, usage, composition,
and more
http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/textonly.htm

------------------------------

Albert E. Krahn
Milwaukee WI 
http://www.punctuation.org/

Milwaukee Area Technical College
http://online.matc.edu/eng-201/syllabus.htm

“punct-l focuses on punctuation, and is run by Albert E. Krahn” 
English Language Research Postgraduate Tips
http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/pgweb/pgtips.htm

--------------------------------------

Fundamentals of English Grammar: Description and Use
Donald E. Hardy
Dept. of English, Northern Illinois University
http://www.engl.niu.edu/dhardy/grammarbook/title.html

Donald E. Hardy
dhardy@niu.edu

-------------------------------------
GARY A OLSON
University of South Florida

http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~olson/vita/edu.html

PUNCTUATION MADE SIMPLE
http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~olson/pms/


===============================
OTHER PROFESSIONALS
===============================

Gary B. Larson
Seattle, Washington 
http://garbl.home.attbi.com/resume.htm

Gary B. Larson's portal to an editorial style manual, annotated
directory of writing Web sites, concise writing guide, personalized
advice and writing forum

GARBLE’S WRITING CENTER
http://garbl.home.attbi.com/


This online style manual can be a useful reference to answer your
writing questions about abbreviations, capitalization, English
grammar, numbers, punctuation, spelling, terminology and word usage.

STYLE MANUAL
http://garbl.home.attbi.com/stylemanual/
http://garbl.home.attbi.com/writing/grammar.htm

-----------------------------------------

Mary Newton Bruder - The Grammar Lady
http://www.grammarlady.com/resume.html

--------------------------------------------

Now I have a couple of suggestions for you --

1 --  do a search for English Professors on the website of the
university that is closest to you. As I said, every university has an
English department and those professors are certainly qualified to
comment on the usage of parentheses.

2 -- contact the managing editors of any large newspapers in your
city. Again they should be able to help you or at least guide you in
the right direction. Newspaper editors know everyone!


That should give you what you need to find the expert you are looking
for. Please let me know if anything I’ve said is not clear or if any
of the links don’t work. I’d be happy to clarify for you.

Thanks so much for your question, and especially for your fine
clarification. It certainly made the difference between an
unanswerable question and an answerable one!

Best of luck with your project –

--K~

Search terms—

Most of the texts books I knew about so looked them up by name.
Looked up publishers by name
Looked up authors by name

Also searched –

University professor English grammar
Professor English grammar punctuation
Editor grammar English
Professional writer editor grammar

well done.  thank you.

Dear Blcaslin,

I think this problem is simpler than it may appear, such that you may
not need an expert at all.

In your example, the first party's claim that the word "bike(s)" means
plural is an assertion that "bike(s)" means the same as "bikes" - in
other words, that the parentheses here have absolutely no meaning or
function in the sentence.  If we make the elementary assumption that
there _is_ some function served by the parentheses and they are not
merely a mistake or pointless decoration (and I'm under the purely
amateur impression that that is a standard assumption in interpreting
legal documents), we can deduce that the second party is correct and
that "bike(s)" must mean "bike or bikes as the case may be or
require".

I hope this helps.

Carnegie

I wholeheartedly agree with CARNEGIE-GA: the issue is simpler than it
appears.  It requires two things: trusting your own native-speaker
ability and the purpose of parentheses in English-language discourse,
in particular juridical discourse.  Assuming that you have
native-speaker fluency, we must remember that parentheses generally
introduce or add information to the neighboring text.  It would seem
that BIKE = one bike, BIKES = several bikes and BIKE(S) = bike OR
bikes.  The  grapheme BIKE(S) exemplifies a set-theoretical concept,
if you wish, often illustrated with Venn diagrams.  In other words
BIKE(S) = BIKE(BIKES), whose universe is the set of the SINGLE BIKE
CASE and the MULTIPLE BIKES CASE.  I know that I am going off the deep
end with this.  But, no native speaker of English in his or her right
mind would ever see in the expression BIKE(S) an exclusion of either
case. But, let's look at this parenthesis thing with two examples.

EXAMPLE 1
Consider a policy clause: ''This insurance policy will cover any
bike(s) purchased by the current occupant of this property.''

INTERPRETATION
All the bikes are covered.  How many though? Well, we just use the
counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4,.... Say that we discover that we stop at
ONE.  Hence, the expression BIKE(S) still works. Remember that we
suggested above that BIKE(S) represents the universe consisting of the
SINGLE BIKE CASE as well as the MULTIPLE BIKES CASE.

EXAMPLE 2
Consider a marketing instrument: ''We will replace your bike(s) if
their wheels are defective.''

INTERPRETATION
Assume that you have acquired three bikes from the firm issuing this
document. One bike has defective wheels, and two bikes have acceptable
wheels.  Question: Do you have to destroy the wheels of another bike
to be eligible for the replacement?  No!!! Reread the clause: ''We
will replace your BIKE OR BIKES if their wheels are defective.  The
possessive adjective THEIR has as its antecedent, I would argue, BIKE
OR BIKES: the expression THEIR covers the universe consisting of two
and only two sets {BIKE} and {BIKES}. These sets are mutually
exclusive, at least semantically, for we must agree that BIKE can
never be BIKES.

It can be argued that BIKE is a proper subset of BIKES: consider a
group of BIKES and remove ONE BIKE. However, this would be confusing
the signifiant with the signifié. Let's restrict our argument here to
the words BIKE and BIKES in their syntactic and semantic functions. 
For the purposes of my blathering away here, I have completely ignored
whether {BIKES} is a set of inextricable welded and fused two-wheeled
non-motorized vehicles.

All this over parentheses!!!  Oh well, I can't wait to see the
followup to all this.