Language desk
< July 5	<< Jun \| July \| Aug >>	July 7 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 6[edit]

English punctuation[edit]

I'm not sure what punctuation is appropriate for the following sentence: "... this plasmid was modified by addition of a 2A sequence – a so-called self-cleavage motif – and a sequence encoding puromycin N-acetyl transferase."

The 2A sequence is a so-called self-cleavage motif. Should "a so-called self-cleavage motif" be delineated by hyphens, commas or a semi-colon and then a comma? --129.215.47.59 (talk) 17:11, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Seems fine to me.--Khajidha (talk) 17:50, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Definitely not a semi-colon/comma. Your options are commas, brackets, or hyphens.

Hyphens work well.
Parentheses work just as well: "... this plasmid was modified by addition of a 2A sequence (a so-called self-cleavage motif) and a sequence encoding puromycin N-acetyl transferase."
Commas work, although not as well, because the sentence could be ambiguous to those not in the scientific know, as it might suggest the plasmid was modified by 3 things rather than 2. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:27, 6 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with Jack that parentheses are an option, but you don't want hyphens; you want either spaced en dashes – as you used in your original post – or unspaced em dashes. The spaced en dashes are more common in British usage, whereas the unspaced em dashes are more common in U.S. usage. See MOS:DASH, which strives to cover the dash bases. Deor (talk) 02:06, 7 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Forgive me, for pernickety punctuator as I am, I am not a particularly pernickety punctuator. :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 06:37, 7 July 2018 (UTC) [reply]