The Probate Section of the State Bar of Michigan has EPIC Q & A, a collection of questions on EPIC answered by a panel of experts, masterminded by Judge Harter, and displayed on ICLE’s website. These Q&As get a good bit of traffic and can be very helpful for the practitioner who has read the statute and the commentary but is still stumped on a particular question.
On a tip from one of ICLE’s excellent copyeditors, I stumbled on a copyeditor’s version of the EPIC Q&A at the Chicago Manual of Style Online (CMOS). CMOS is a subscription site but ICLE has access through the University of Michigan. While admittedly not material that everyone finds interesting, as a fifth-grade first-place award winner of a grammar contest, I found the material enlightening. While browsing the collection of Q & As, I noted the following advice regarding:
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When to use a bulleted list and when to use a numbered list (numbered lists used when the material is used as a guideline for a consecutive order, bulleted lists when there is no particular order).
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When to use “that” and when to use “which,” which I always find confusing (“which” sets off unnecessary clauses, “that” introduces a necessary clause).
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When to use “could” and when to use “would” (“would” is more polite, because it expresses the idea of probability, and of willingness, and of the desire that something be done, whereas “could” is more in the realm of ability).
These answers got my attention but when I found that CMOS undertook to answer whether a dead person’s advice, coming through a channeler, should be put in quotation marks, I knew I would be sharing this site with friends. Then, CMOS answered a question about split infinitives by referencing the opening to Star Trek and this became my new favorite site.
The most welcome news for me was the revelation that people need no longer torture a sentence so as to keep it from ending with a preposition. CMOS informs me that only the elderly or the very conservative still cling to this rule. Why don’t these kinds of pronouncements make it on to CNN? I could have been saved much painful rewriting over the years.
Finally, like EPIC Q &A you can submit a question but if you haven’t done your research you may be chided, but gently, “Questions like these are frequently asked but rarely answered in this space because they’re so easy to check in a dictionary.”