Kyle Hardgrave

Introduction

Hello. I am a student in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania and a fairly casual user of Wikipedia. I'm not really qualified to make substantive edits to most articles, but I do know a bit about style and grammar — I'm something of a religious user of The Chicago Manual of Style or, for newspapers, The Associated Press Stylebook — so I just clean up errors I see in my everyday use of Wikipedia. I also try to foster stylistic consistency within articles. The most frequent mistake (it will probably soon be considered standard usage, it is so prevalent) is the lack of a comma for offset words like states, years, and titles.

For example:

Wrong: He travels to Washington, DC and New York.
Right: He travels to Washington, DC, and New York.

Or:

Wrong: Martin Luther King, Jr. was a great man.
Right: Martin Luther King, Jr., was a great man.

Same goes for Inc., Co., countries, years — anything offset with a comma. So remember those commas!