Week 8 - Punctuations

Hello, everyone. In this last week of the course, I’ll cover all the ‘extant’ punctuation marks— that is, those that we still use—and point you to some course resources that describe ‘extinct’ punctuation marks, along with punctuation marks that some people would love to see come into regular use. We need to take punctuation seriously because excellent punctuation demonstrates our command of grammar and style. We punctuate to reveal the structure of our writing to our readers. Clear structure can help to clarify the meaning of our writing. Punctuation also helps us to control the pace and rhythm of our writing.

You need to learn how punctuation marks reveal structure and, in doing so, clarify meaning. Learn to use specific marks in an informed way; study sentences in well-punctuated prose to learn the particular marks; construct your own set of guidelines for punctuating. Punctuation should be there quietly doing its job, consistently indicating connections between words and ideas.

It should be noticeable only to punctuation vigilantes.

Hemingway apparently never used the semicolon, but he doubtless knew it existed. Mark Twain once sent his publisher a page of punctuation for his editor to insert where needed. Oscar Wilde once spent a morning putting in a comma, and the afternoon taking it out.

The overriding principle is consistency.

Each punctuation mark should convey a signal to your reader. You can have a grammatically incorrect sentence that’s perfectly punctuated, but you can’t have an incorrectly punctuated sentence that’s perfectly grammatical. Punctuation marks in writing can indicate where a speaker would pause, but they do not necessarily always coincide. Spoken and written language differ in form.

Writing isn’t merely written down speaking. Speaking conveys meaning through vocal quality: tone, pitch, volume, pace, pauses, emphasis, and rhythm. The only time that you’ll need to insert punctuation that mirrors spoken communication is when you write speeches for administrators and politicians. Punctuation can be crucial to understanding.

In World War II, many ‘Dear John letters’, which ended relationships, were sent to those serving in the armed forces.

Do you think that this is a ‘Dear John letter’?

‘Dear John, I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy. Will you let me be yours? Gloria’.

No, that’s not a ‘Dear John letter’. Is this a ‘Dear John letter’?

‘Dear John, I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, Gloria’.

Indeed, it is a ‘Dear John letter’.

There are four main types of punctuation marks: stoppers, linkers, intruders, and intoners. Stoppers include the full stop, or period, and the comma. Linkers include the semicolon, colon, and the dash. Intruders include the comma pair, dash pair, and bracket pair, and intoners include the exclamation and question marks.

I’ll cover some of these in this lecture, and the remaining ones in the next lecture.

Other marks are the apostrophe, the hyphen, quotation marks, the slash, and the ellipsis. The full stop, or period, is used to signify the end of a sentence, and to make certain abbreviations, but you need to check these because usage differs.

Here’s Jesse Kornbluth quoting Isaac Babel:

‘No iron can strike the heart with as much force as a period in exactly the right place’.

That sentence appears in a short story called ‘Guy de Maupassant’, which is appropriate, because that is exactly how de Maupassant wrote: Sentences that advanced the narrative; paragraphs with punch; stories that stopped on a dime.

The word ‘comma’ comes from the Greek word for a cut or segment.

Commas have many uses. They’re placed after an introductory sentence element. ‘However hard I try, (comma) I still can’t get everything right’. They prevent overreading.

‘The trip had been fun, (comma) for her frame of mind was always good heading off for a holiday’.

Can you see why you need a comma after ‘fun’? They separate main clauses.

‘The steering was stiff, but the car cruised like a dream’.

Notice one of the FANBOYS there—‘but’.

They substitute for the word ‘and’ between adjectives in ‘the shiny, silver coin’. They set off non-essential information in ‘our car, a red sedan, won’.

The comma handles separate the description of the car, which is not essential to the sentence.

Now we come to the Oxford or Harvard or serial comma. This is used for the final ‘and’ or ‘or’ in a series. That is, when you have at least three items.

The group ‘Vampire Weekend’ even have a song about the Oxford comma.

‘Remember to check your grammar, spelling, and punctuation’.

‘Jane bought books, coffee, and milk’. The commas separate the three items in each of these sentences. Robert Ritter, author of ‘The Oxford Guide to Style’, enthusiastically endorses the Oxford comma, which has been part of Oxford University Press style for more than a century. He says that it’s commonly used by other publishers in the UK and forms a routine part of style in US and Canadian English.

Unfortunately, Stephen King doesn’t seem to know what it is.

In a recent interview with a reporter for ‘The Atlantic’, which you’ll find listed in your course resources, she asked him ‘Oxford comma? Yea or nay?’ King said: ‘It can go either way. For instance, I like “Jane bought eggs, (comma) milk, (comma) bread, (comma) and a candy bar for her brother”, but I also like “Jane raced home and slammed the door”, because I want to feel the whole thing as a single breath’. There’s no call for the Oxford comma in his second sentence, because there is no series.

You must have at least three items to use the Oxford comma.

Be careful not to misuse commas, although you might get a free beer, as I did, if someone compiling a menu puts a comma in the wrong place.

‘Northern Reef Spotted Cod, (comma) Beer, (comma), Batter, (comma), Chips.

Don’t put a comma between a subject and a verb unless you insert other words.

‘The cat, (comma) sat on the mat’? No. No comma needed after ‘cat’.

‘Cats, who are friendly creatures, love milk’.

Those comma handles are fine. Make sure that you have both handles, though.

We use semicolons to separate closely related independent clauses.

‘To write is human; to edit is divine’.

Here’s Stephen King again, in his wonderful book ‘On Writing’.

I hope he doesn’t mind that I have substituted a semicolon for the comma in his original sentence.

‘Please put it in the trash can; that’s good news for everyone’.

There was great excitement about this semicolon when it appeared on a message board in New York City subway stations.

We also use semicolons to punctuate detailed lists that have internal punctuation.

‘Remember to check your grammar, especially agreement of subjects and verbs; your spelling, especially tricky words like “liaison”; and your punctuation, especially your use of the apostrophe’.

Pancho Villa allegedly said: ‘Don’t let it end like this, tell them I said something’. We’ll consider this in the second lecture this week.

‘Only two things in life really matter: Dark chocolate and light chocolate’. The part after the colon adds further information.

The dash gathers a series of thoughts—comments on the proceeding text—or expresses an afterthought. There are two kinds of dashes: The ‘em’ dash and the ‘en’ dash.

We use the em dash to gather up the subject or object of a sentence when either consists of a long list.

Consider the sentence:

‘Mild sweetness, creamy centre, made in Belgium – my criteria for confectionery are steep’.

Take care never to use more than one, or one pair, of em dashes in a sentence.

The en dash is used unspaced in spans of figures and expressions relating to time and distance.

For example: ‘1950-2014’.

A comma pair is used to mark a parenthetical element in a sentence, in situations where brackets (parentheses) would be clumsy, or slow up the sentence.

For example, ‘I would have ordered calamari, so long as it was fresh, but it wasn’t on the menu’.

A pair of em dashes is sometimes used to mark off a parenthetical element in a sentence. This is called a ‘dash pair’.

An example of this is: ‘We knew that we—even with our training—were no match for them’.

Parentheses (round brackets) are used for material that wouldn’t ordinarily fit into a sentence, but which you’d like to include regardless.

If they’re in the middle of a sentence, then the first word isn’t capitalised nor is there any full stop. If the parentheses surround a full sentence, then it is punctuated as normal.

For example: ‘Seven sailors (of Madagascan origin) were hired for the voyage’.

Compare this with: ‘We then travelled to Omsk. (Recall that Omsk is a city in south-western Siberia.)’— where ‘recall’ is capitalised and there is a full stop after ‘Siberia’.

Square brackets are not used very often. They’re used to add information to quoted language.

For example: ‘They went from there to Magdalen college [at Oxford University]’.

They’re also used when adding ‘sic’ to a quotation. ‘Sic’ means ‘thus’ and is used to ensure that the reader knows that a mistake is not yours, but is a faithful quotation of the original.

The writer of ‘Gladstone was a man of great importtance’ couldn’t spell ‘importance’ [sic].

I’ll cover the remaining punctuation marks in the next lecture. In the meantime, there’s a punctuation exercise for you to do below.

Other punctuation marks.

Welcome to the second lecture on punctuation.

The exclamation mark should rarely be used in formal writing. However, it is useful in dialogue, and does have a place in informal communication for interjections. ‘Get out of here!’ and ‘Surprise!’ are examples of exclamation.

When it comes to question marks, you must make sure that they always follow a question. For example: ‘Would you please bake me a cake’ is a request. However, ‘Can you bake cakes?’ is a question.

‘Julia asked why Gertrude Stein had such a strange attitude to punctuation’ is a statement, not a question.

The apostrophe is used to form contractions and to form the possessive case.

Never use an apostrophe to form a plural— this is called the greengrocer’s plural, because it’s very common to see misspelled words such as ‘tomato’s’— and never use one in possessive pronouns such as ‘ours’ or ‘yours’.

Consider this first example. ‘Your’, spelt ‘y-o-u-r’, is a possessive pronoun, used in ‘your house’. ‘You’re’—‘y-o-u-‘-r-e’—is the contracted form of the phrase ‘you are’.

Note the different spellings of ‘there’, ‘they’re’, and ‘their’.

The phrase ‘Exploiting the situation for all its worth’ means to exploit the situation for all the worth of it, as ‘its’ is in the possessive case.

‘Exploiting the situation for all it’s worth’ (with an apostrophe) means to exploit the situation for all that it is worth.

When making singular words possessive, add ‘apostrophe-s’, as in ‘the book’s cover’— meaning the cover of the book.

When making plural words possessive, add ‘apostrophe-s’ if they don’t end in ‘s’, such as in ‘the children’s books’—the books of the children. If the plural already ends in ‘s’, as most plurals do, then add an apostrophe only, as in ‘The soldiers’ uniforms’—the uniforms of the soldiers.

The hyphen is used in compound expressions, and when a word is divided at the end of a line of text.

For instance, the phrase ‘A man eating crocodile’ means a man who is eating some crocodile. However, in ‘A man-eating crocodile’, where ‘man’ and ‘eating’ form a compound, you now have a crocodile that eats people.

The sentence ‘There were 50-odd students at the lecture’ means that there were about 50 students at the lecture.

Without the hyphen, the meaning is quite different, and could be rather insulting to the students. In written documents, use single quotation marks for parts of a whole text and italics for the whole text.

For example, short poems, songs, articles, chapters, and episodes of a TV series are parts of a larger whole, and so use quotation marks.

However, books, newspapers, and TV series are whole texts, and so should be written in italics.

Martin Amis’s ‘The Zone of Interest’ would be written with the title in italics.

To refer to chapter two of the novel, ‘To Business’, I would put the name of the chapter in quotation marks. When using quotation marks to indicate dialogue, punctuate as logically as possible.

For example, in the sentence ‘“Is he still there?”, asked Jane’, the question mark goes inside the quotation marks, because it applies to the question that Jane asks.

However, in ‘He said: “No, I don’t think so”.’, the full stop is outside the quotation marks, because it ends the entire sentence, not just the dialogue.

When using quotation marks within a quotation or piece of dialogue, use double quotation marks such as in the sentence—‘James said “yes”’, she replied’.

I have posted a note in the course resources for this week that discusses the movement towards logical punctuation, which places the period on the outside.

This has been common in Australia and the UK, but is now becoming more acceptable in the USA—by Conan O’Brien, for one.

The slash is used to indicate a choice between words, and normally takes the place of the word ‘or’. For example, ‘The Oxford/Harvard/serial comma’.

Slashes can also be used to indicate a break in a line of poetry, as in

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud / that floats on high o’er vales and hills’.

The ellipsis is used to indicate an omission.

For example, when removing a sentence from a quote, an ellipsis takes the place of that sentence, as in: ‘Barnaby wrote: “We have nothing to do with this … I am completely free of blame”’. In prose, an ellipsis indicates a pause, such as in the sentence: ‘He wasn’t … was he?’ It can also indicate a trailing off, such as in: ‘I was going to … never mind’. Here are some final reminders for using punctuation effectively.

Aim to punctuate for ‘structure’ to reveal, ‘meaning’ to clarify, and ‘pace’ to control. Study sentences in well-punctuated prose to learn the particular marks, and familiarise yourself with how they should be used. As Adorno says:

‘Punctuation marks are the stitches that hold the quilt of language together’. Construct your own set of guidelines for punctuation.

Remember, punctuation should be there quietly doing its job, and be visible only to those who are looking for it. Make sure that every punctuation mark you use conveys a signal to your reader to slow down, to stop, et cetera.

There are many ways to punctuate writing, and many different rules and options. You must make certain that you are knowledgeable and consistent in your use of punctuation. See how you go with the exercise below.