Sunday, August 28: The A.D.D. Detective
The POINT of PUNCTUATION
by Leigh Lundin
Goodnight Irene
Florida braced for Hurricane Irene just as I was finishing roofing a house partially destroyed in a previous hurricane. After Category 4 and 5 storms, Floridians yawn at a mere Category 1. Indeed, surfers were out riding the waves, although one was killed when he was rammed head-first into the sand.
Category 1 doesn’t mean Irene shouldn’t command respect, especially in regions without hurricane-resistant building codes. One hundred MPH projectiles are deadly, especially if the projectile is human. Irene is taking its time, hammering some locations up to twelve hours as it moseys along.
Even minor storms can cause New York City problems. Winds that might be sub-hurricane at lower storeys could reach 150mph at the 150th floor. Architects design skyscrapers to flex in high winds. It can be intimidating to ride an elevator that slaps the sides of the lift shaft.
While writing this article, I thought Irene might bracket my article with clever transitions, punctuating the experience with excitement as it dashed up the coast. Thus far it’s done neither, for which we can be grateful.
Getting Good Marks
Punctuation as we know it didn’t appear until the 15th century. Since then, English has accumulated fourteen symbols. Languages like Chinese don’t require punctuation, although full-stops are now used in Japanese.
Not only can North American punctuation differ from British English (surprise!), but mavens within each don’t always agree about usage. When it comes to dialogue, the British often use single quotation marks whereas North Americans usually use double quotes. Twentieth century English writers may omit the period from abbreviated titles, e.g, Mr, Mrs, and Dr.
Another matter of dispute is whether to fully punctuate lists with a comma before the ‘and’, such as the above list: Mr, Mrs and Dr, versus Mr, Mrs, and Dr, the latter which Oxford University calls a ‘serial comma‘. Stylists in US legalese circles dictate the final comma should be omitted.
Some punctuation can have overlapping functions. At least two style guides suggest writers can precede lists with either colons or dashes.
The semicolon, half comma / half colon, has an undeserved reputation as a half-assed punctuation sibling, "indicating a pause, typically between two main clauses, that is more pronounced than that indicated by a comma." Parenthetically, I’ve notice the few times I’ve used a semicolon, editors usually change them to commas, as in “Everyone knew; no one did anything.”
Gotta Dash
You’re familiar with the big brother of the hyphen, the dash. Like spaces, they come in two flavors, the standard en-dash and the extra long em-dash. (The prefixes suggest the typographical width of the space and dash; i.e, the width of a lower case n and m.)
I’ve come across two recent articles that debated the dash, particularly the m-dash. Kamilla Denman discusses Emily Dickinson’s use of punctuation in an essay for Modern American Poetry. But writing for Slate, Noreen Malone gives us an object lesson about overuse of the m-dash.
In reading Noreen’s article, my ADD warred. I found the article interesting but the continual interruptions from spurious punctuation urged me to give up and move on to fascinating studies of Etruscan census lists. But, she gives us a compact literary history in this paragraph:
| “ | … "Dickinson’s excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the result of great stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and as a mere idiosyncratic, female habit." Can there really be— at the risk of sounding like a troglodyte— something feminine about the use of a dash, some sort of lighthearted gossamer quality? Compare Dickinson’s stylistic flitting with the brutally short sentences of male writers—Hemingway, for instance— who, arguably, use their clipped style to evoke taciturn masculinity. Henry Fielding apparently rewrote his sister Sarah’s work heavily to edit out some of her idiosyncrasies— chief among them, a devotion to the dash. In Gore Vidal’s Burr, the title character complains— in a charming internal monologue— "Why am I using so many dashes? Like a schoolgirl. The dash is the sign of a poor style. Jefferson used to hurl them like javelins across the page." … | ” |
Dashed if I Know Quiz
As mentioned above, English uses 14 punctuation marks. All have been used or mentioned in this article, perhaps in devious ways. Can you name all fourteen?
The punctuation answers in order of appearance:
1. brace
2. period/full-stop
3. comma
4. apostrophe
5. dash
6. bracket
7. parentheses
8. exclamation mark
9. quotation marks
10. semicolon
11. colon
12. hyphen
13. ellipse/ellipsis
14. question mark
Of course you could argue the comma appeared first.
Okay, Leigh, I would have sworn I know all about punctuation and when mine is wrong it’s because of a typo or misused intentionally, but I learned a few things in today’s essay.
I visited all the links, and I’m sadly considering abandoning my Oxford commas. I especially liked the Punctuation Pyramid and wish I’d had that when I taught.
Good job!
> Of course you could argue the comma appeared first.
Oh, very clever photo, Mr Lundin. (grin)
An old favourite is Victor Borge’s audible punctuation.
Special thoughts to all, especially those of our CB family, on the eastern seaboard as your unwelcome guest passes through.
Fran, thanks. I thought the Punctuation Pyramid was pretty cool, too. Noreen Malone’s article is a good lesson of how excessive punctuation hurts writing.
ABA, I’d forgotten about Victor Borge’s skit, but recalled his exclamation point the instant you mentioned it. Good eye– I deliberately picked the hurricane photo for its shape.
Irene has been downgraded to a ‘tropical storm’ as it passes from New York through New England.
I am keeping my serial commas. The style guides saying they are superfluous are flat wrong. Style guides are often wrong.
Consider the following:
“Famous comedic partnerships include Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, and Rowan and Martin.”
If you delete that last comma according to the latest guidance, what comes out is this:
“Famous comedic partnerships include Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello and Rowan and Martin.”
Barbaric.
I love my dashes and I am not remotely girly. Burr’s observation that they are a sign of poor style says more about Burr (and probably Gore Vidal, whom I generally admire) than it does about dashes. They are more forceful than parentheses, the same way an exclamation mark is more forceful than a period, and like the exclamation point, they can be easily abused.
Personally, I prefer the old-fashioned m-dash used without spaces over the newer fashion of using an n-dash bracketed by spaces. I provide the following deliberately girly example:
“Dad desperately wanted me back—you know what some fathers are like when it comes to their little princesses . . . ”
looks better to me than
“Dad desperately wanted me back – you know what some fathers are like when it comes to their little princesses . . . ”
I admit I have a blind spot on the whole dashes hyphens thing. I fire them out randomly and trust the editor to fix them. (Reminds me of a language expert I know who was married to a Japanese scientist. He could not cope with A versus THE – a distinction that doesn’t exist in Japanese, so he put them into his papers at random and had his wife edit them.
And, as I said, yesterday, this has been interesting considering what I will be writing about on Wednesday. As my father used to say, great minds run in the same gutter.
James, I also prefer serial commas, although I can think of tactical examples where I might choose not to use them:
As I mentioned once, some word processors and dumb browsers would break dashes in the wrong place, if at all, which led me to use asymmetry– like this (dash+space), to avoid situations
—like this.
But Leigh, your example is like mine, because the salt and pepper are a pair and not discrete items, so the rule still applies. It would actually be better as:
You may note that I got rid of the comma after the opening adverbial because it isn’t strictly necessary.
I gotta say, I too prefer serial commas, and em-dashes with no spaces. My main argument for serial commas is the clarity issue.
I meant to take my stand as well in favor of serial commas. I was convinced by an example I saw in Strunk and White (I think) which went vaguely like this:
The will says: I divide my estate equally between James, Leigh, Rob and Melanie.
Do the four get equal shares, or do Rob and Melanie split one?
You can argue that if it were the latter there would be an AND before Rob. But tuck in a comma after Rob and there is no need for an argument, and you cheat several lawyers out of a few hours billable time.
Who’s Melanie?
She lost her brand new roller skate key.
Whoa, Leigh, you must be almost as old as I am . . .
I saw Melanie perform at a bar in Newport, R.I., in 1986. By then, she was built like a tank and had long stringy gray hair, but man, could she deliver a song. “Candles in the Rain” brought down the house. Absolutely great. I still smile when I think about it.
Leigh… beat me to it. I saw her back in the seventies. Here’s my favorite song, about which she said, at the concert: “I wrote this when I was nine months pregnant. A pregnant woman in her ninth month is thinking differently than a non-pregnant woman in her ninth month.” How true.http://tinyurl.com/3nspsqu