Ampersand Your Little Dog, Too

 

Ampersands annoy me. I’m not sure why. Well, I have some reason, but it’s not proportionate to my disgust.

Here’s my thinking: When a reader is chugging along reading a passage, his brain is in word mode. Ampersands aren't words. They're symbols. And it seems to me that they're jarring to a mind focused on forming words from sounds and sounds from letters. 

I first started thinking about how we digest words when I learned that the Chicago Manual of Style prefers to write out numbers. Before then I had worked only in AP style, which prefers to numerals for most numbers greater than nine (in most cases).

So in AP style, you’d say that someone is 33 years old, but in Chicago style, you’d usually say she’s thirty-three. AP style is influenced by a longtime concern of news editors: space. Back in the days when all news was on newsprint, it was very important to use the space on a page as efficiently as possible. That is, when you’re printing a half million copies of something, you want to employ every tool at your disposal to keep the page count down. So AP almost always opts for shorter forms like 33 instead of longer forms like 33.

When I started using Chicago style, I saw a wisdom in its rule about numbers: the words “thirty-three” flow into the other words in the surrounding sentence. My brain is seeing letters and thinking sounds -- sounds that come from the letters themselves. Numerals seem to tap a different part of my brain. The sounds associated with them seem farther removed.

It’s almost like toggling between words and pictures in a graphic novel. Your brain has to change gears. And in straight text, that breaks up the flow.

And this, in a nutshell, is why ampersands in running text drive me nuts. When you’re reading running text, your brain is in word mode -- using letters as cues to sound. Like numerals, ampersands offer no phonic help whatsoever. Plus, they’re visually jarring and look unprofessional.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong ...

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