"How to start a sentence: Consider all your alternatives, and sprinkle in some conjunctions, too"

"How to start a sentence: Consider all your alternatives, and sprinkle in some conjunctions, too" Bryan Garner has a great article here.

Chicago Manual of Style's 17th edition

The Seventeenth Edition of The Chicago Manual of Style arrived in the mail yesterday. There are many changes to update this edition from 2010’s sixteenth edition. Some noteworthy changes:

• guidance on using they as a gender-neutral way to refer to a specific person (5.48)
• removed the hyphen from email (7.89)
  
• internet, no capital I (7.80)
• guidance on PDF annotations  (2.119)
• guidance on nonbreaking and other types of spaces (6.119)
• new examples of currency showing Chinese currency and bitcoin (9.23)
• sanctions US as a noun (10.32)
• coverage of metadata and keywords (throughout, see 1.75, 1.93, 1.111, 1.120)
• added guidance for self-published authors and how they can benefit from following procedures once only followed by traditional publishers (throughout, especially chs. 1–4)

"Massive new searchable database of federal court opinions, including ones that haven’t been formally published"

"Massive new searchable database of federal court opinions, including ones that haven’t been formally published" The database is maintained by Free Law Project and is available here. Eugene Volokh explains here.

Volokh: "Judgment" predominates over "Judgement" in American English

Volokh: "Judgment" predominates over "Judgement" in American English. He uses Google Ngrams to demonstrate. Also, the reverse continues to be true, but less so, in British English, "judgment" predominated in British English until the 1800s, and American legal writers use "judgment" over "judgement" even more than other American writers.

Maine labor dispute decided by the Oxford comma

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit handed down an opinion that interpreted the phrase “The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution” to group “packing for shipment or distribution” together rather than as the last two items in the list.

Why I use UberConference (and FreeConferenceCall.com)

I've tried a couple free conference-call services. Here's why I like UberConference:

• The host can share her computer screen with participants who log in by computer.
• I don’t have to schedule a call. If I do, I can get reminders, notifications when others join, etc.
• Registered users don’t have to enter a code to join calls.
• Participants can call in or use the audio equipment on their computers.
• Participants can log in to see who’s talking at any point during the call.
• Participants who use the online login (no registration needed) can edit others’ phone number to show their names.
• It can connect with LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media to show profile pictures and some other shared information.
• It sends a summary of the call, with a list of participants and how long each talked, after the call. Settings can also be set to send the summary to participants.
• Host can record the call.
• Host can pick hold music!