RE: Question about questions

["Thomas Quine" <quinet -at- home -dot- com>]

My feeling is that unless a question has been asked before and is easily
found in the archives, it's quite legit to ask it again.
I am reading the weighty exchange on documentation management very closely
and enjoying it a lot, but I also think there should be room for the
occasional small topic, like an editing, grammar, or spelling question.
You asked:
"How do you hyphenate 'well
to moderately well drained soils'?
I would say "well- to moderately well-drained soils". I believe the current
fashion is never to hyphenate words ending in "ly", since there's little
possibility of confusion that these words are adverbs. On the other hand,
the rule is always to hyphenate whenever there is any possibility of
confusion. For instance, the sentence fragment "drinking from a well-worn
leather pouch" is clearer than "drinking from a well worn leather pouch,"
because in the second example, the mind immediately thinks of "well" as a
noun, the kind of well that one can drink from, and the phrase "worn
leather" might also be confusing.
The word "groundwater" is found in the dictionary, so of course is one word,
but that brings up the question of when and how words morph from open
compounds to hyphenated compounds to closed compounds. Bottom line here is
common parlance. As the word "online" became increasingly common and took on
a pretty distinct meaning in common parlance, it evolved from "on line" to
"on-line" to "online". "On line writing" is now a confusing phrase (are we
writing lines?) - "Online writing" is not. Similarly "e-mail" to "email",
"set up" to "set-up" to "setup", "log in" to "log-in" to "login", and so on.
What is common parlance is sometimes a hard call to make, which is why these
constructions cause a lot of trouble to many people. At what point is a
closed compound called for? When it's the clearest expression to your
readers. That can be kinda subjective...
- Thom
Subject:	Question about questions

Is it common to post those annoying little editing questions, like "Is
'groundwater' usually one word or two words?" or "How do you hyphenate 'well
to moderately well drained soils'?

These kind of questions pop up all the time, and, as a new editor for an
environmental engineering firm, I've been winging the answers up to this
point.  I did notice today, my first day with Techwhirl, that several posts
referred to the "deterioration of list content."  That's why I'm wondering
whether technical editing questions are typical in these postings.

Thanks.



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