Arg

[avram]

Chris mentioned that NYU is offering a course in storyboarding; I’ve been thinking of picking up this skill, since I think I’d be good at it and it seems like a good way to pick up money on a flexible schedule. Unfortunately, being NYU, they’re charging like $900 for it. I figured SVA would charge a lot less, and since we were on 23rd Street anyway, we detoured over to the main SVA building and I picked up the Fall 2002 continuing education course catalog. I’ve looked it over, and discovered a few things:

• The Advertising department has all the best course titles and descriptions. They would, wouldn’t they? They actually offer a classes called “Oooh, Advertising Sounds Like an Interesting Career, I Think I’ll Take This Class”, and “Get Humiliated” and — oh, just look for yourself.
• There doesn’t seem to be a course in just storyboarding.
• The Illustration & Cartooning department offers a whole bunch of interesting courses. (Not surprising, that’s what I majored in.) “Drawing New York City” involves going around the city drawing on location. “Anatomy of a Portrait: All About Faces” also intrigues. Anyway, “Cartooning for Syndication, TV and Comic Books” is probably what I want, despite the missing serial comma; it covers a bunch of stuff including storyboarding, and it’s only $410. First session was today. Oops. I really should have thought of this a few weeks ago, ideally before the summer so I maybe could have taken a course already. I may look into it anyway; it’s a twelve-session course, so I might still be able to profit from the remaining eleven.

Comments

comma

[cthulhia]

"item, item and item"
is correct.
so is
"item, item, and item"
as long as you pick one style and stick with it. (The trend lately is to reduce comma use.)

In a local proofreading course, the description ends with "if you can't find the typo in this course description, you need this class"

The typo was that comma use was not consistent. One serial list had that last comma, one did not.

I wouldn't have mentioned it except that it was also in a class description. I'm not that pedantic.

Re: comma

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

Found by TNH, I believe.

Re: comma

[avram]

"Item, item and item" is allowed by many style manuals, and popular, but it's wrong. It's based in the mistaken notion that the comma is a sort of virtual and, when it actually indicates the pauses people insert when speaking such a list. Removing such a pause (and the comma) from between the last two items implies the existence of a connection between those items that doesn't exist between the other items in the list, and leads to cases like the following (the first a book dedication, the second an actual television schedule listing):

"This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

"By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector."

you can fight it out with the copy editors...

[cthulhia]

I only know from the corrections I have to make as a layout editor.

The prevailing trend is use as little punctuation as possible, probably to keep up with how technology changes our writing styles.
This can be blamed as much on Coding Languages (although, probably not in the specific case of commas) as it can on the pervasive e.e. cummings trends in netposts.

Living languages aren't stagnant, much to the dismay of my pedantic pals.