hey, I couldn't find this under the Spelling & Grammar Standards, so I'll ask it here.
are there any rules as to when to use such as or like? a lot of the corrections in the GP Stage of my Analyses have been like such as , which seem to be a common mistake with lots of people. I'm not a native english speaker so I don't know if there are any rules for it and if so, what they are.
Shadestep im not gp or anything, long ago i think
fleurdyleurse gave me this:
http://pastebin.com/GNxxBjTj
there, in notes, is your answer
so, breaking it as simply as i can, "like" is to express similarity, "such as" for examples
(fwiw, the standards only cover Pokegrammar and Smogon-specific conventions, not English grammar in general, but we often also discuss the latter in there, so that thread is the best place for questions like this.)
Like and such as serve similar purposes, but they carry different nuances. The specifics are a tad tricky, but it works pretty much like this: "like", quite literally, means "similar to", so when you're saying "teammates like Omastar and Garbodor", that implies that you're not talking about teammates in general, but about teammates "similar to" Omastar and Garbodor, i.e., hazard setters. "Like" is used here to include an additional nuance with the category "teammates", which makes it correct to use. "Such as" on the other hand implies that the given examples are just that, examples--e.g., "Swords Dance sweepers such as Drapion and Virizion", which don't have anything significant in common aside from being Swords Dance sweepers.
However, to make things even trickier, they are interchangeable to an extent--e.g., even though they're not arbitrary examples from the category "Pokemon", "Pokemon
such as Rapidash and Flareon" is perfectly fine, because it's very clearly implied that we're talking about offensive Fire-types here and we don't need the extra nuance expressed by "like" to convey that we're not talking about Pokemon in a general sense. Not to mention that whether or not a similarity is significant enough to warrant employing "like" can be pretty subjective to begin with--"Water-types like Suicune and Milotic" is absolutely fine as long as you consider the extra nuance
bulky Water-types to be significant; otherwise, "such as" is equally correct here.
more reading here:
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/like-versus-such-as
and here:
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/grammar-dojo-see-post-61.3508366/page-4#post-5716550
and here:
http://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/spelling-and-grammar-standards.3490681/page-15#post-6422882
As a rule of thumb, "such as" is usually your safer bet, but for broad categories, "like" works just as well. (and apologies for the technical answer heh)