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In terms of the exception to the "outing" rule, I was assuming that the person being outed was the vulnerable person. I see my error now, and this makes sense.

I agree 100% that it's improper and mean to continue to refer to Samantha as Tom.

I was just pointing out an exception around citations. Imagine Jane Johnson gets married and changes her name to Jane Doe. If I'm writing a paper in APA style, where last names are used in citations, my choices are, "Johnson (2000) found that..." or "Doe found that ... (Johnson, 2000)." or something like "Doe (née Johnson) found that ... (Johnson, 2000)." In no event can I not use "Johnson", because that's the name on the paper. I'm clearly using it deliberately (which runs afoul of the rule), but not maliciously. For more on this, see: http://blog.apastyle.org/apast...

For my case of replying to an old email, I actually struggled with this for several minutes before ultimately deciding to just drop the "On DATE, NAME" bit. I ultimately determined the answer to my own question, so I dropped the email before sending it.

The "claims" rule includes "Knowingly", "harmful", and "false" as conditions. You seemed to have focused primarily on "false". I had proposed dropping "harmful", so that "Knowingly making false claims" was prohibited, regardless of whether they were "harmful". If someone is knowingly making false claims about me, why should I have to show they are harmful? If someone is making false claims knowingly, they by definition have malicious intent. Or, from a different angle, one might argue that a false claim is always harmful, simply because it's false.

Why Does Every Word Begin With A Capital?

Capitalizing the first letter of everything but articles and prepositions (under 5 letters long) is called "Title Case"

Quotation marks are also used for slang, jargon, and similar unusual words, including ordinary words used for an unusual meaning, in a context in which the reader may be unfamiliar with the meaning. In this usage, quotes take the place of the phrase "what is called". Essentially you're quoting a group, rather than a person.

For example, a newspaper article written for the general public, one might write "he met up with his 'homeboy' or "Intel's Pentium computer processors had a bug in the 'floating point unit', the part of the processor which handles fractions."

http://www.writingwithclarity....

http://blog.apastyle.org/apast...

I don't want to pay firefighters to be trained in a car that .000001% of the populace has.

NOMENCLATURE NAZI: ADD LEADING ZEROS TO DECIMALS. ALWAYS.

This says maybe.

This is a nice article. I still disagree with him. And the problem here isn't the 6 zeros followed by a one: what if if the value was .1000001 rather than .0000001? Or was that 1.00001?

It's easy to figure out the latter is "wrong" because we don't do leading zeros. But the "leading 1"?

The leading decimal point is easy to miss. Make it easier to see with a leading 0.

Oh, and add commas to every 3 digits in a long (over 3 digits) string, too.

1324536 or 132456? Are they the same? Don't think about it, notice on the fly?

Or is 1,324,536 the same as 132,456? You can notice they're different even while still parsing the statement.

An MIT?

See here.

http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/04/using-a-or-an-with-acronyms-and-abbreviations.html

It depends on how you say MOOCS.

Hey dumb ass, X0563511 has it right: the period goes inside the quotes when it's the end of the sentence. Back to summer school for you.

I'll let these guys and gals make the final call on what style I use when I write.

The APA way to format papers includes several ways to cite electronic references. There's a free guide for URLs here.

Now the validity of the work being cited is another story altogether, as you say. But the same could be true for 'traditional' media as well - would you take someone seriously who quoted the National Enquirer's latest fad diet tellall in a "professional" paper about nutrition?

5. Remove unnecessary links. We don't need to link to CNN's home page every time we write the letters "CNN." Just link to the article or issue at hand.

I would beg to differ on this one. It is only polite to link to the site to which you are refering. It's kind of the same as in written works, it is considered appropriate to provide full citations when referencing other's work. Plus that is the nature of the web. The more highly interconnected it is the better