Spelling and Grammar Standards

Lumari

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By official GPTL decree, "since" has been freed.* The main argument for its original ban (ambiguity between "from the moment that" since and "because" since) arbitrarily singles it out over "as", not to mention problem cases aren't prevalent enough to warrant blanket banning it.

However, do be wary of cases where "since" actually is ambiguous, and do still change it in those cases. Consider a sentence like
Since the wolves attacked the village, the people have been living in fear.
There's no way to tell from this sentence whether "since" means "ever since" or "because", and in ambiguous cases like this, feel free to change "since" as appropriate. Just don't eliminate it on sight any longer :)

More reading: http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/because-due-to-since-and-as?page=1

*just remember to give it the same treatment as "as" (add a comma before it if it means "because". and if the added comma makes it feel awkward, feel free to change it to "because" after all. there's some weird obscure rule that i'm not gonna bother you with rn that actually makes "because" correct in those cases and "as" / "since" incorrect, so your intuition is on point.)

Shoutout to P Squared for spearheading the rectification of this terrible injustice.

can we lift the ban on since

i think it's a dumb rule

That is all.
 

P Squared

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shoutout to The Dutch Plumberjack for doing all the actual work to make this happen. shoutout to me for kinda just doing what I want and making other people find justifications for it xd

is this how tier leaders feel when they unban stuff??
 

Minority

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tdp edit: i moved the following posts to this thread because this is where it goes and it was getting a derail in the analysis at this point

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The Smogon Dex and PS! teambuilder / dex use the format Arceus-type. Vast majority of Ubers players when discussing Arceus use the format Arceus-type. No official source uses type Arceus, not the games, not even the TCG.

I'm sick of seeing Ubers analyses having this pushed, a change that has no basis, goes against standard competitive practice, and makes for a lower quality analysis. This needs to be stopped and all current analysis that have any use of type Arceus should be changed to Arceus-type for the sake of consistency.
 
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Sobi

Banned deucer.
Minority Suspect every single correct ubers analysis from XY onwards i think has [type] Arceus instead of Arceus-[type]. idk if this is a thing or whatever in ubers but it's part of the spelling and grammar standards so ideally it needs to be used :o perhaps The Dutch Plumberjack could shed some light on the topic?
 

Lumari

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this message comes co-signed by p2 and gato

Ok... as for no official source using "Type Arceus", no official source uses "Arceus-type" either, so that argument kinda leads nowhere. And the PS teambuilder is just not an argument because it also uses Thundurus-Therian and Rotom-Wash and even Charizard-Mega-X and a ton of other non-kosher things (like, it pretty much always does the exact opposite of the grammar standards). From what I can tell, the reason (one that I can sympathise with fwiw) they (and the dex) use Arceus-Fairy over Fairy Arceus is alphabetisation and nothing else; it's pretty clear that that is the thing being prioritised when they're using Pinsir-Mega (which does contradict official sources). I mean, PS first implemented the hyphenated forms, but this has been a standard since long before PS. And as long as we are not actually wrong, "we were first" is still a very valid argument.

While I doubt you'll consider " "Arceus-Fairy" looks plain repulsive" a valid argument (and I wouldn't disagree with you on that one anyways), grammarwise, the type is literally an adjective modifying Arceus, so "Grass Arceus" is perfectly logical, much more so than "Arceus-Grass", it's the exact same idea as using Mega Pinsir over Pinsir-Mega, which no one has any real objections to. (yes, this implies that "Wash Rotom" and "Therian Thundurus" would be preferable over the truncated hyphenated forms, and if we were to ever go for hyper consistency, that is the direction we would take, rather than going for hyphenated forms exclusively, but changing it is an enormous hassle that's not worth it atm).

However, as much as I barely see a reason why Arceus-Fairy would be preferable, I must admit that I don't have the reason why it has been standardised to Fairy Arceus on hand (though it's worth noting that all standardised formes either use an adjective like Primal Groudon or are truncated like Tornadus-T, neither criterion of which Arceus-Fairy fits). It is a standard from the DPP era, and I've been digging around to see if I can find some discussion from back then, but the only remotely related thread I've managed to dig up says the following:
Refer to the various forms as "Steel Arceus" or "Electric Arceus", etc, not "Steel-type Arceus" in your analyses.
From which I'm inferring that att the playerbase primarily used "Steel Arceus" and "Steel-type Arceus" alongside each other and it was standardised as Steel Arceus for cleanness purposes. Nowhere in that thread does it mention "Arceus-Steel", so I can only assume the playerbase actually did not use that variant when the name was standardised. But since I'm making assumptions here, I'm gonna tag Oglemi (who's one of the few people I know of that were around att) to see if he knows more.

Lastly, I'd appreciate it if you didn't proclaim that a given standard "has no basis" (and just how does it lower the quality of the analysis ?_?) when you weren't around when it was first established and don't know the rationale under which that was done. We're always happy to discuss and question standards, but "here is the rationale that was used att and here is why it's bad" will get you a lot further than "your rules are arbitrary and I'll ignore them, the end".
 

Minority

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Basically my push for this is because for at least the past 2 years the Ubers community has used Arceus-type over type Arceus in discussions and day to day activities.

It lowers the quality of the analysis because it uses unorthodox nomenclature (not what the community uses when talking about this Pokemon whether it's common discussion, RMTs, or data threads). type Arceus is the current standard because someone made it that way long ago, not because it's official or what the community actively uses and this is why it butts heads with Ubers analysis writers.
 

GatoDelFuego

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Minority Suspect so as far as I know, the community also created the Type Arceus standard, 8 or 10 years ago. Back when Bojangles first standardized it, Arceus-type wasn't even mentioned because it wasn't ever used. From what I can tell, the push to Arceus-type has been really driven by PS! formatting it as such.

Now if the Ubers community has changed the normal thing and is truly behind this, then that's a good reason to change it. I'll talk about the benefits and downsides to either of the standards all day. If that's really what every day communications are like, then cool. Issue is, changing this is pretty much 1 step away from changing everything to Pokemon-Mega and that's something I don't like. Pokemon-Mega was not used by pretty much anyone (from my viewings of the XY and OU forums) until it became formatted as such on PS!. What's my overall point? Is that exposure to the term will sway people either way.

This is slippery slope fallacy of course, but I think it's still relevant because from what I see people will conform to standards if they just see it enough. I don't see many authors writing Pokemon-Mega anymore because it was "stamped out"; a similar thing could be done to Arceus-type over time. I think. Note that Type Arceus is not "correct" in any way, but we should stay consistent across the site in how we handle things.

We made up all of our standards for formes and such for Pokemon; we can change them at will. There was some talk itt a few pages back of changing Rotom-W and Rotom-F into Wash Rotom and Fan Rotom; something that honestly sounds pretty good because it's actually referred that way by Pokemon™ itself. Once we get a chance to mass purge that from the dex that could be nice. So, all our formes/abbreviation/otherPokemonType things, such as Tornadus-T, Rotom-W, Primal Groudon, Mega Rayquaza, or Arceus follow one of two patters: adjective in front of the Pokemon, or after the Pokemon and includes a hyphen. So if we wanted to really get specific Arceus-type should be abbreviated; but that's obviously not gonna work? But like I said, if this is REALLY what the entire community wants then ok.
 

Minority

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There's not really any need to bring up the Pokemon-Mega thing at all. Mega Pokemon is the official name (unlike type Arceus) and everyone uses Mega Pokemon anyways (unlike type Arceus). Don't see how changing the standard of type Arceus to Arceus-type affects how we treat Mega evolutions in the slightest. Just use a baseline of what is official and then for everything that isn't official just use what the community most commonly uses (but is still professional, aka nothing like Arc Water or Dragceus because those look awful). If what the community most commonly uses changes in a span of 10 years so be it, we're constantly updating analyses for an ever-changing metagame already.

The official name of a Pokemon is a binary system, same with what is used by a majority of the community so there aren't actually any complications here. If consistency in regards to changing the standard to Arceus-type and having all the old type Arceus still on dex really is such a concern for this I'll edit every on site gen 6 Ubers analysis to use the format of Arceus-type myself. Also we have numerous instances of Arceus-type already on dex so, not like changing anything here creates any further dex inconsistencies. I'd argue the contrary actually, now we can start to eliminate uses of type Arceus as stuff gets revamped because the rouge Arceus-type that slipped into many analyses (due to being the community standard) is now supported by GP.
 

GatoDelFuego

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I bring up Pokemon-Mega because I have seen plenty of people use it in their posts and theads; maybe not a big majority but a significant number of people. Still, not "everyone" uses Mega Pokemon in their posts, and by that same logic I can guess that not EVERYONE uses Arceus-type as well. In my opinion, Arceus-type looks awful, just as much as other slang. If we set the standards based on what some people liked looking at, then maybe we wouldn't have stuff like VoltTurn and SubCM and Extreme Killer. But I'm wiling to change that, because things shouldn't be based off of just what I think looks ok.

What I know right now is that a vast majority of the dex and analyses, for gen 4, 5, and 6, use the standard of Type Arceus. I don't think changing these would be that big of an issue, just that it would take some time. What I don't know is what a vast majority of Ubers users say. Can we get some way to poll what the community uses? Right now all I have on testimonial is you. Because if 1. all of Ubers says Arceus-type and 2. we can scrub Type Arceus from the dex, then that sounds good to me.
 

Minority

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What I don't know is what a vast majority of Ubers users say. Can we get some way to poll what the community uses?
All you have to do is go to an Ubers thread and type "command f Arceus". It's very clear that Arceus-type dominates forum discussion. The places where you do see type Arceus, usually it's where it has been imposed by GP. A good place to see this is in the RMT forum where the 7 most recent RMTs exclusively use Arceus-type for ~100 occurrences, but the one staff archive RMT (which got edited by GP) uses type Arceus.

No idea why this is being met with so much resistance. Dex uses Arceus-type, PS! uses Arceus-type, damage calculator uses Arceus-type, forum data threads use Arceus-type, discussion usually uses Arceus-type.
 
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Lumari

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For the record, I do consider
discussion usually uses Arceus-type.
, or "that's what the community calls it", a valid argument for changing the standard here (the only valid argument that is, bc as Gato said players started using Arceus-type because PS, arbitrarily att, formatted it as such, not the other way around), because... with a lack of an official formatting, that's really all we have to go off. Which is how people arrived at Rock Arceus att.

But I'm sorta curious where the format Rockceus falls here, which _is_ used a lot in discussion, because I do see this as a simplified variant of Rock Arceus, not Arceus-Rock (I don't want to make any statements on whether that one or Arceus-Rock is used more without running the numbers, but there's no doubt it isn't insignificant in the slightest). There's no way I'd ever support standardising Rockceus ofc, but the reason I consider this relevant is because from what I've been noticing the people that tend to default to Rockceus in discussion also tend to default to Rock Arceus in analysis writing (Fireburn and shrang are two that come to mind for whom I don't think I've ever had to change the formatting of Arceus names), so I'm having some trouble believing that Arceus-Rock is the be-all end-all format in (basically) every Ubers player's mind.
 

Minority

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There are many abbreviations for many things, but still a definitive version. For example you'll see Stealth Rock abbreviated to SR or rocks, you'll see Arceus-Water abbreviated to Arc Water or Waterceus or whatever. I don't claim that Arceus-type is the end-all format in every player's mind, just that it makes the most sense for that to be the official format (due to dex, sim, calc, forum use on top of it being the most used for commonplace discussion).

Before you make a comparison to Primal Groudon, this is not in the same case because the calc, forums, and commonplace discussion still use Primal Groudon in lieu of Groudon-Primal.

Megas are in a similar case.
 
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fleurdyleurse

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Hey, everyone. I've got something here that I think we should take a closer look at: the phrase "bring down to its Focus Sash," which I don't think makes much sense.

This phrase is extremely common in analyses with a Focus Sash set; however, what does make more sense is "bring x down to 1 HP". The Focus Sash is activated, and the Pokemon is not brought down to the Focus Sash (for reasons like it being the one carrying the Focus Sash and the phrase not making sense overall). Thus, I suggest using "activate its Focus Sash" or "bring it down to 1 HP".

What do you think?
 

Lumari

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Hey, everyone. I've got something here that I think we should take a closer look at: the phrase "bring down to its Focus Sash," which I don't think makes much sense.

This phrase is extremely common in analyses with a Focus Sash set; however, what does make more sense is "bring x down to 1 HP". The Focus Sash is activated, and the Pokemon is not brought down to the Focus Sash (for reasons like it being the one carrying the Focus Sash and the phrase not making sense overall). Thus, I suggest using "activate its Focus Sash" or "bring it down to 1 HP".

What do you think?
Don't see anything wrong with it :[ I mean, 1 HP is the point where the Focus Sash is activated, i.e., the point where it's relevant / "exists", so metonymically it makes sense fine to say equate the two and say "down to its Focus Sash" for "down to <the point where> its Focus Sash <activates>." You can also view it diagrammatically, like, picture its health bar, naturally with the Focus Sash being at the 1 HP point, and if a Pokemon is "knocked down to its Focus Sash", that says it's knocked down its health bar all the way till the point where the Focus Sash resides, which, of course, is exactly what's happening. I agree that being literal is better, but if a phrase is super ingrained like this one and not just plain wrong like "both sides of the spectrum" or "win condition" (which literally cannot mean what they're used to denote and also weren't defensible as figurative speech), then trying to stamp it out seems like a waste of effort / pointless.

kind of in a rush so apologies for godawful wording
 
can anyone tell me why every "All-Out Attacker" set name is being changed to "All-out Attacker"? iirc, the former is correct capitalization in titles, will link a source if necessary
 

Sobi

Banned deucer.
can anyone tell me why every "All-Out Attacker" set name is being changed to "All-out Attacker"? iirc, the former is correct capitalization in titles, will link a source if necessary
i spoke to tdp on discord, i hope he doesn't mind me quoting him (but if you do, lmk)

yeah, consistency with title case. either capitalise stuff after hyphens or don't, but don't enforce it in the one case and not enforce it in the other case

All-Out Attacker can def. be correct, but then we should also be using "Grass-Types", which we don't
so in short, it's for consistency with "x-type"
 
this is specifically in titles (set names), though. x-type isn't really relevant when it comes to set names
 

Lumari

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this is specifically in titles (set names), though. x-type isn't really relevant when it comes to set names
"X-type" is relevant when it comes to checks and counters tags, which use title case as well. Tbqh I would not at all mind using both "All-Out Attacker" and "**Grass-Types**:", but policy has always been pretty passionate about lowercasing "Types" in the latter, and then it makes no sense from what I can tell to use a different kind of title case for "All-Out Attacker" :/
 
ah right, my mistake, i forgot about the checks & counters tags. i would definitely prefer changing everything in checks & counters to "**Grass-Types**:" to match "All-Out Attacker", though at this point it's probably better to leave everything as is lol
 
  • Use RBY as an abbreviation for the Red / Blue / Yellow generation.
  • Use GSC as an abbreviation for the Gold / Silver / Crystal generation.
  • Use ADV as an abbreviation for the Advance Ruby / Sapphire / Emerald generation.
  • Use DPP as an abbreviation for the Diamond / Pearl / Platinum generation.
  • Use BW as an abbreviation for the Black / White / Black 2 / White 2 generation.
RB, GS, RS, and DP are acceptable too, no? If not, I feel like they should be, because that's what they're called on the dex. (in before someone brings up arceus forms)

Also, I think there should be some mention here about it being acceptable to use FRLG, HGSS, BW2, or ORAS when talking about something that was specifically introduced to a generation in those games (e.g. Brave Bird on Ho-Oh in HGSS).
 

Lumari

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RB, GS, RS, and DP are acceptable too, no? If not, I feel like they should be, because that's what they're called on the dex. (in before someone brings up arceus forms)

Also, I think there should be some mention here about it being acceptable to use FRLG, HGSS, BW2, or ORAS when talking about something that was specifically introduced to a generation in those games (e.g. Brave Bird on Ho-Oh in HGSS).
I'd very much prefer uniformity, and the dex is inconsistent in more ways than just Arceus formes :U And I'm pretty sure the second point is implied by saying that RBY / GSC / ADV / DPP / BW refer to _generations_? If a given move was introduced in a game not part of those acronyms, then yes it's clearly fine to refer to those games. I suppose we could add something to make that explicit, but it's pretty intuitive and has never caused trouble before afaik so I feel it's a tad redundant really, but if more people feel it should be added then sure.

Speaking of, though, especially with SM coming up we should probably figure something out about what acronym to use to refer to generation VI, because "ORAS" would be inconsistent with previous generations, and "ORAS megas" is a pretty bad argument to give it a special treatment because it's really the same thing as move tutors / Kyurem-B / Giratina-O in previous gens, just to a more extreme degree. A better argument in favour of going with ORAS is potentially to be found in some tours differentiating between XY and ORAS metagames and including both (was this ever a thing in previous gens? will it continue into SM or will ORAS be the only gen VI metagames included?) And I'm not sure to what extent "overturning standard vernacular" (because ORAS currently is the default--again, idk what this was like in old gens) is worth it :/
 

GatoDelFuego

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Why not just "XY"? In gen IV we said stuff like "HGSS" to refer to new move tutors and stuff like that, but then we basically reverted to DPP. The issue is that both XY and ORAS were out for the same amount of time, unlike past generations.
 
I think it would be good for the list of standards to include how to spell and capitalize team archetype names. Is it Hyper Offense, Hyper-Offense, hyper offense, or hyper-offense?
 

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