X

Punctuation

… that learned men are well known to disagree on this matter of punctuation is in itself a proof, that the knowledge of it, in theory and practice, is of some importance. I myself have learned by experience, that, if ideas that are difficult to understand are properly separated, they become clearer; and that, on the other hand, through defective punctuation, many passages are confused and distorted to such a degree, that sometimes they can with difficulty be understood, or even cannot be understood at all.

ALDUS MANUTIUS, Interpungendi Ratio, 1566
(trans. T. F. and M. F. A. Husband, 1905)      

This is a large subject. Whole books have been written about it, and it is still true, as it apparently was some five hundred years ago, that no two authorities completely agree. Taste and common sense are more important than any rules. You put in punctuation marks or ‘stops’ to help your reader to understand you, not to please some grammarian; but you should try to write so that your reader will understood you with a minimum of help of that sort. The Fowlers, in The King’s English, say:

it is a sound principle that as few stops should be used as will do the work … Every one should make up his mind not to depend on his stops. They are to be regarded as devices, not for saving him the trouble of putting his words into the order that naturally gives the required meaning, but for saving his reader the moment or two that would sometimes, without them, be necessarily spent on reading the sentence twice over, once to catch the general arrangement, and again for the details. It may almost be said that what reads wrongly if the stops are removed is radically bad; stops are not to alter meaning, but merely to show it up. Those who are learning to write should make a practice of putting down all they want to say without stops first. What then, on reading over, naturally arranges itself contrary to the intention should be not punctuated, but altered; and the stops should be as few as possible, consistently with the recognized rules.

The symbols we shall have to consider in this chapter are the apostrophe, colon, comma, dash, full stop, hyphen, inverted commas, question mark, semicolon. It will also be a suitable place to say something about capital letters, paragraphs, parentheses and sentences.

APOSTROPHE

The only uses of the apostrophe that call for notice are (1) its use to denote the possessive of names ending in s, and of pronouns; (2) its use before a final s to show that the s is forming the plural of a word or symbol not ordinarily admitting of a plural; and (3) its use with a defining plural.

(1) There is no universally accepted code that governs how one forms the possessive case of names ending in s, but the most desirable practice (especially with monosyllables) seems to be not just to put an apostrophe at the end of the word, as one does with an ordinary plural (strangers’ gallery), but to add a second s—Mr Jones’s room, St James’s Street, not Mr Jones’ room, St James’ Street.

As to pronouns, all these except the pronoun one dispense with an apostrophe in their possessive cases—hers, yours, theirs, ours and its, but one’s not ones (and someone’s, anybody’s, everyone’s, nobody’s etc.). It’s is not the possessive of it but a contraction of ‘it is’: the apostrophe is performing its duty of showing that a letter has been omitted.

(2) Whether an apostrophe should be used to denote the plural of a word or symbol that does not ordinarily make a plural depends on whether the plural is readily recognisable as such. Unless readers are really likely to need help, it should not be thrust upon them. This practice is clearly justified with single letters: ‘there are two o’s in woolly’; ‘mind your p’s and q’s’. Otherwise it is rarely called for. It should not be used with contractions (e.g. MPs), or merely because what is put into the plural is not a noun. Editors of Shakespeare do without an apostrophe in the line from Richard III, ‘Talk’st thou to me of “ifs” ’. And Rudyard Kipling did not think it necessary when he wrote, in the Just So Stories:

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

   And seven million Whys!

(3) Whether one should use an apostrophe in such expressions as ‘thirty years imprisonment’ is a disputed and not very important point. The answer seems to be that if thirty years is regarded as a descriptive genitive or ‘possessive’, as busman’s is in busman’s holiday, we must write thirty years’ imprisonment. But if ‘thirty years’ is taken to be an adjectival phrase (equivalent here to ‘three-decades-long’), there must be no apostrophe but the words must be hyphenated: thirty-years imprisonment.* The singular form (‘a year’s imprisonment’) can only be a descriptive genitive, but in such phrases as ‘games master’ and ‘customs examination’, the words games and customs are clearly adjectival, and need no apostrophe.

CAPITALS

Several correspondents have asked me to write about the use of capital letters. The difficulty is to know what to say. No one needs telling that capitals are used for the first letter in every sentence, for proper names and the names of the months and days, and for the titles of books and newspapers. The only difficulty is with words that are sometimes written with capitals and sometimes not. Here there can be no general rule; we are free to do what we think most fitting. But two pieces of advice may perhaps be given:

(1) Use a capital for a particular and a small letter for the general. Thus:

It is a street leading out of Oxford Street.

I have said something about this in Chapter I; I shall have more to say in later chapters.

In this case the Judge went beyond a judge’s proper functions.

Many parliaments have been modelled on our Parliament.

(2) Whatever practice you adopt, be consistent throughout any document you are writing.

Colon

About the use of the colon there is even less agreement among the authorities than about the use of other stops. All agree that its systematic use as one of a series of different pause-values has almost died out with the decay of the formal ‘period’: the single sentence that contains a number of well-balanced clauses. One person will hold that the colon is still useful as something less than a full stop and more than a semicolon; another will deny it. We need not enter into this. It will be enough to note that the following uses are generally regarded as legitimate:

(1) To mark more sharply than a semicolon would the antithesis between two sentences:

In peace time the Civil Service is a target of frequent criticism: in war time the criticism is very greatly increased.

In some cases the executive carries out most of the functions: in others the delegation is much less extensive.

(2) To precede an explanation or particularisation or to produce a list or series: in the words of Fowler, to deliver ‘the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words’:

The design of the school was an important part of the scheme: Post Office counters with all the necessary stores were available and maps and framed specimens of the various documents in use were exhibited on the walls of light and cheery classrooms.

News reaches a national paper from two sources: the news agencies and its own correspondents.

For the second purpose the dash is the colon’s weaker relative.

COMMA

The use of commas cannot be learnt by rule. Not only does conventional practice vary from one period to another, but good writers of the same period differ among themselves. Moreover, stops have two kinds of duty. One is to show the construction of sentences—the ‘grammatical’ duty. The other is to introduce nuances into the meaning—the ‘rhetorical’ duty. ‘I went to his house and I found him there’ is a colourless statement. ‘I went to his house, and I found him there’ hints that it was not quite a matter of course that he should have been found there. ‘I went to his house. And I found him there’ indicates that to find him there was surprising. Similarly you can give a different nuance to what you write by encasing adverbs or adverbial phrases in commas. ‘He was, apparently, willing to support you’ throws a shade of doubt on his bona fides that is not present in ‘He was apparently willing to support you’.

The correct use of the comma—if there is such a thing as ‘correct’ use—can only be acquired by common sense, observation and taste. Present practice is markedly different from that of the past in using commas much less freely. The sixteenth-century passage that heads this chapter, translated to keep its original punctuation intact, is peppered with them with a liberality not approved by modern practice.

I shall attempt no more than to point out some traps that commas set for the unwary. First I shall deal with some uses of the comma that are generally regarded as incorrect, and then I shall consider various uses which, though they may not be incorrect, need special care in the handing, or are questionable.

A. Incorrect uses of commas

(1) The use of a comma between two independent sentences not linked by a conjunction. The usual practice is to use a heavier stop in this position:

The Department cannot guarantee that a license will be issued, you should therefore not arrange for any shipment.

You may not be aware that a Youth Employment Service is operating throughout the country, in some areas it is under the control of the Ministry of Labour and National Service and in others of the Education Authorities.

I regret the delay in replying to your letter but Mr X who was dealing with it is on leave, however, I have gone into the matter …

On the principle that in workaday writing of this kind, sentences should be short and should have unity of thought, it would be better to put a full stop after issued in the first quotation, country in the second and leave in the third. (See also the entry below on the semicolon, pp. 264–5.)

(2) The use of one comma instead of either a pair or none. This very common blunder is more easily illustrated than explained. It is almost like using one only of a pair of brackets. Words that are parenthetical may be able to do without any commas, but if there is a comma at one end of them there must be one at the other end too:

Against all this must be set considerations which, in our submission are overwhelming. (Omit the comma.)

The first is the acute shortage that so frequently exists, of suitable premises where people can come together. (Omit the comma.)

We should be glad if you would inform us for our record purposes, of any agency agreement finally reached. (Either omit the comma or insert one after us.)

It will be noted that for the development areas, Treasury-financed projects are to be grouped together. (Either omit the comma or insert one after that.)

The principal purpose is to provide for the division between the minister and the governing body concerned, of premises and property held partly for hospital purposes and partly for other purposes. (Omit the comma.)

(3) The use of commas with ‘defining’ relative clauses. Relative clauses fall into two main classes. Different authorities give them different labels, but ‘defining’ and ‘commenting’ are the most convenient and descriptive. If you say ‘the man who was here this morning told me everything’, the relative clause who was here this morning is a defining one: it completes the subject the man, which conveys no definite meaning without it. But if you say ‘Jones, who was here this morning, told me everything’, the relative clause is commenting: the subject Jones is already complete, and the relative clause merely adds a bit of information about him (it may or may not be important, but is not essential to the definition of the subject). A commenting clause should be within commas. A defining clause should not. This is not an arbitrary rule; it is a utilitarian one. If you do not observe it, you may fail to make your meaning clear, or you may even say something different from what you intended. For instance:

A particular need of the moment is provision for young women, who owing to war conditions have been deprived of normal opportunities of learning homecraft …

Here the comma announces that the relative clause is a commenting one, designed to imply that the mass of young women had this need, with war conditions as the explanation. Without the comma the clause would be read as a defining one, limiting the need to the particular young women who had in fact been deprived of these opportunities (‘those young women who owing to war conditions have been deprived …’).

The commas are definitely wrong in:

Any expenditure incurred on major awards to students, who are not recognised for assistance from the Ministry, will rank for grant …

The relative clause must be a defining one, but the commas suggest that it is a commenting one, and imply that no students are recognised for assistance from the Ministry.

In the next quotation too the relative clause is a defining one:

I have made enquiries, and find that the clerk, who dealt with your query, recorded the name of the firm correctly.

The comma turns the relative clause into a commenting one and implies that the writer has only one clerk. The truth is that one of several is being singled out, and this is made clear if the commas after clerk and query are omitted.

The same mistake is made in:

The Ministry issues permits to employing authorities to enable foreigners to land in this country for the purpose of taking up employment, for which British subjects are not available.

The grammatical implication of this is that employment in general is not a thing for which British subjects are available.

An instruction book called ‘Pre-aircrew English’, supplied during the war to airmen in training in Canada, contained an encouragement to its readers to ‘smarten up their English’, adding:

Pilots, whose minds are dull, do not usually live long.

The commas convert a truism into an insult.

(4) The insertion of a meaningless comma into an ‘absolute phrase’. An absolute phrase* always has parenthetic commas around it, e.g. ‘then, the work being finished, we went home’. But there is no sense in the comma that so often carelessly appears inside it. For instance:

The House of Commons, having passed the third reading by a large majority after an animated debate, the Bill was sent to the Lords.

The first comma leaves the House of Commons in the air waiting for a verb that never comes.

(5) The use of commas in an endeavour to clarify faultily constructed sentences. It is instructive to compare the following extracts from two documents issued by the same department:

It should be noted that the officer who ceased to pay insurance contributions before the date of commencement of his emergency service, remained uninsured for a period, varying between eighteen months and two-and-a-half years, from the date of his last contribution and would, therefore, be compulsorily insured if his emergency service commenced during that period.

Officers appointed to emergency commissions direct from civil life who were not insured for health or pensions purposes at the commencement of emergency service are not compulsorily insured during service.

Why should the first of these extracts be full of commas and the second have none? The answer can only be that, whereas the second sentence is reasonably short and clear, the first is long and obscure. The writer tried to help the reader by putting in five commas, but all this achieved was to give the reader five jolts. The only place where there might properly have been a comma is after contribution, and there the writer has omitted to put one.

Another example of the abuse of a comma is:

Moreover, directions and consents at the national level are essential prerequisites in a planned economy, whereas they were only necessary for the establishment of standards for grant-aid and borrowing purposes, in the comparatively free system of yesterday.

The proper place for in the comparatively free system of yesterday is after whereas, and it is a poor second best to try to throw it back there by putting a comma in front of it.

(6) The use of a comma to mark the end of the subject of a verb, or the beginning of the object. It cannot be said to be always wrong to use a comma to mark the end of a composite subject, because good writers sometimes do it deliberately. For instance, one might write:

The question whether it is legitimate to use a comma to mark the end of the subject, is an arguable one.

But the comma is unnecessary. The reader does not need its help. To use commas in this way is a dangerous habit; it encourages writers to shirk the trouble of arranging each sentence so as to make its meaning plain without punctuation.

I am however to draw your attention to the fact that goods subject to import licensing which are despatched to this country without the necessary license having first been obtained, are on arrival liable to seizure.

If the subject is so long that it seems to need a boundary post at the end, it would be better not to use the slovenly device of a comma but to rewrite the sentence in conditional form:

if goods subject to import license are despatched … they are on arrival …

And in the following sentence, the comma merely interrupts the flow:

I am now in a position to say that all the numerous delegates who have replied, heartily endorse the recommendation.

Postponement of the object may get the writer into the same trouble:

In the case of both whole-time and part-time officers, the general duties undertaken by them include the duty of treating without any additional remuneration and without any right to recover private fees, patients in their charge who are occupying Section 5 accommodation under the proviso to Section 5 (I) of the Act.

This unlovely sentence obviously needs recasting. One way of doing this would be:

The general duties undertaken by both whole-time and part-time officers include the treating of patients in their charge who are occupying Section 5 accommodation under the proviso to Section 5 (I) of the Act, and they are not entitled to receive additional remuneration for it or to recover private fees.

(7) The use of commas before a clause beginning with that. A comma was at one time always used in this position:

It is a just though trite observation, that victorious Rome was herself subdued by the arts of Greece. (Gibbon, 1776)

… the true meaning is so uncertain and remote, that it is never sought, because it cannot be known when it is found. (Dr Johnson, 1781)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Jane Austen, 1813)

We are more sparing of commas nowadays, and this practice has gone out of fashion. In his book of 1939, Mind the Stop, Mr G. V. Carey goes so far as to write, ‘it is probably true to say that immediately before the conjunction “that” a comma will be admissible more rarely than before any other con-junction’.

B. Uses of commas that need special care

If we turn from uses of the comma generally regarded as incorrect to those generally regarded as legitimate, we find one or two that need special care.

(1) The use of commas with adverbs and adverbial phrases.

(a) At the beginning of sentences.

In their absence, it will be desirable …

Nevertheless, there is need for special care …

In practice, it has been found advisable …

Some writers put a comma here as a matter of course. But others do it only if a comma is needed to emphasise a contrast or to prevent a reader from going off on a wrong scent, as in:

A few days after, the Minister of Labour promised that a dossier of the strike would be published.

Two miles on, the road is worse.

On the principle that stops should not be used unless they are needed, this discrimination is to be commended.

(b) Within sentences. To enclose an adverb in commas is, as we have seen, a legitimate and useful way of emphasising it. ‘All these things may, eventually, come to pass’ is another way of saying ‘All these things may come to pass—eventually’. Or it may serve to emphasise the subject of the sentence: ‘He, perhaps, thought differently’. The commas underline he. But certain common adverbs such as therefore, however, perhaps, of course, present difficulties because of a convention that they should always be enclosed in commas, whether emphasised or not. This is dangerous. The only safe course is to treat the question as one not of rule but of common sense, and to judge each case on its merits. Lord Dunsany, in his Donnellan Lectures, blames printers for this convention:

The writer puts down ‘I am going to Dublin perhaps, with Murphy’. Or he writes ‘I am going to Dublin, perhaps with Murphy’. But in either case these pestilent commas swoop down, not from his pen, but from the darker parts of the cornices where they were bred in the printer’s office, and will alight on either side of the word perhaps, making it impossible for the reader to know the writer’s meaning, making it impossible to see whether the doubt implied by the word perhaps affected Dublin or Murphy. I will quote an actual case I saw in a newspaper. A naval officer was giving evidence before a court, and said, ‘I decided on an alteration of course’. But since the words ‘of course’ must always be surrounded by commas, the printer’s commas came down on them … and the sentence read, ‘I decided upon an alteration, of course’!

The adverb however is especially likely to stand in need of clarifying commas. For instance, Burke, in 1791, wrote:

The author is compelled, however reluctantly, to receive the sentence pronounced upon him in the House of Commons as that of the party.

The meaning of this sentence would be different if the comma after ‘reluctantly’ were omitted, and one inserted after ‘however’:

The author is compelled, however, reluctantly to receive the sentence pronounced upon him …

(2) The ‘throwback’ comma. A common use of the comma as a clarifier is to show that what follows it refers not to what immediately precedes it but to something further back. William Cobbett, in the grammar that he wrote for his young son, pointed out that ‘you will be rich if you be industrious, in a few years’ did not mean the same as ‘you will be rich, if you be industrious in a few years’. He added:

The first sentence means, that you will, in a few years’ time, be rich, if you be industrious now. The second means, that you will be rich, some time or other, if you be industrious in a few years from this time.

In the first sentence the comma that precedes the adverbial phrase ‘in a few years’ is a clumsy device. The proper way of writing this sentence is ‘you will be rich in a few years if you be industrious’. If words are arranged in the right order these artificial aids will rarely be necessary.*

(3) Commas in series.

(a) Nouns and phrases. Below is a list of nouns:

The company included ambassadors, ministers, bishops and judges.

In a sentence such as this one commas are always put after each item in the series up to the last but one, but practice varies about putting a comma between the last but one, and the and introducing the last: ‘ministers, bishops, and judges’. Those who favour a comma there (a minority, but gaining ground) argue that, as a comma may sometimes be necessary to prevent ambiguity, there had better be one there always. Suppose the sentence were this:

The company included the bishops of Winchester, Salisbury, Bristol, and Bath and Wells.

The reader unversed in the English ecclesiastical hierarchy needs the comma after ‘Bristol’ in order to sort out the last two bishops. Without it they might be, grammatically and geographically, either (i) Bristol and Bath and (ii) Wells, or (i) Bristol and (ii) Bath and Wells. Ambiguity cannot be justified by saying that those who are interested will know what is meant and those who are not will not care.

(b) Adjectives. Where the series is of adjectives preceding a noun, it is a matter of taste whether there are commas between them or not. Both of these are correct:

A silly verbose pompous letter.

A silly, verbose, pompous letter.

The commas merely give a little emphasis to the adjectives. Where the final adjective is one that describes the species of the noun, it is regarded as part of the noun, and is not preceded by a comma. Thus:

A silly, verbose, pompous official letter.

DASH

The dash is seductive, tempting writers to use it as a punctuation-maid-of-all-work that saves them the trouble of choosing the right stop. We all know letter-writers who carry this habit to the length of relying on one punctuation mark only—a nondescript symbol that might be a dash or might be something else. Moreover the dash lends itself easily to rhetorical uses that may be out of place in humdrum prose. Perhaps that is why I have been tempted to go to Sir Winston Churchill’s war speeches for examples of its recognised uses.

(1) In pairs for parenthesis:

no future generation of English-speaking folks—for that is the tribunal to which we appeal—will doubt that, even at a great cost to ourselves in technical preparation, we were guiltless of the bloodshed, terror and misery which have engulfed so many lands …

(2) To introduce an explanation, amplification, paraphrase, particularisation or correction of what immediately precedes it:

They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril …

… overhead the far-ranging Catalina air-boats soared—vigilant, protecting eagles in the sky.

… the end of our financial resources was in sight—nay, had actually been reached.

(3) To indicate that the construction of the sentence, as begun, will be left unfinished (grammarians call this anacoluthon):

But when you go to other countries—oddly enough I saw a message from the authorities who are most concerned with our Arab problem at present, urging that we should be careful not to indulge in too gloomy forecasts.

(4) To gather up the subject of a sentence when it is a very long one; after the long loose canter of the subject you need to collect your horse for the jump to the verb:

The formidable power of Nazi Germany, the vast mass of destructive munitions that they have made or captured, the courage, skill and audacity of their striking forces, the ruthlessness of their centralised war-direction, the prostrate condition of so many great peoples under their yoke, the resources of so many lands which may to some extent become available to them—all these restrain rejoicing and forbid the slightest relaxation.

Similarly with the jump from the verb:

I would say generally that we must regard all these victims of the Nazi executioners in so many lands, who are labelled Communists and Jews—we must regard them just as if they were brave soldiers who die for their country on the field of battle.

(5) To introduce a paradoxical, humorous or whimsical ending to a sentence:

He makes mistakes, as I do, though not so many or so serious—he has not the same opportunities.

FULL STOP

The full stop is an exception to the rule that ‘as few stops should be used as will do the work’. I have no advice to give about it except to say that it should be plentifully used: in other words, to repeat the advice I have already given that sentences should be short. I am not, of course, suggesting that good prose never contains long ones. On the contrary, the best prose is a judicious admixture of the long with the short. Mark Twain, in 1890, after advising the young author to write short sentences as a rule, added:

At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure that there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he is done with it, it won’t be a sea-serpent, with half its arches under the water, it will be a torchlight procession.

If you can write long sentences that you are satisfied really merit that description, by all means surprise and delight your readers with one occasionally. But the shorter ones are safer.*

Always use a full stop to separate into two sentences statements between which there is no true continuity of thought. For example, and is too close a link in these sentences:

There are 630 boys in the school and the term will end on April 1st.

As regards Mr Smith’s case a report was made on papers AB 340 and I understand he is now dead.

HYPHEN

In Modern English Usage Fowler makes an elaborate study of the hyphen. He begins engagingly by pointing out that ‘a superfluous hair-remover’ can only mean a hair-remover that nobody wants, and he proceeds to work out a code of rules for the proper use of the hyphen. He admits that the result of following his rules ‘will often differ from current usage’. But, he adds, ‘that usage is so variable as to be better named caprice’. In a style book of 1937 produced for the Oxford University Press, Manuscript & Proof, John Benbow strikes a similar note when he writes of a ‘great twilight zone’ in the use of hyphens, and says, ‘If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad’.

I have no intention of taking hyphens seriously. Those who wish to do so I leave to Fowler’s eleven columns. If I attempted to lay down any rules I should certainly go astray, and give advice not seemly to be followed. I will attempt no more than to give a few elementary warnings.

(1) Do not use hyphens unnecessarily. If, for instance, you must use overall as an adjective (though this is not recommended) write it like that, and not over-all. You need a hyphen to avoid puzzling your reader whether coop is something to put a hen in, or a profit-sharing association (co-op); but the word cooperative can be understood without, and is often written this way. Where you do split a word with a hyphen, make sure you split it at the main break.

(2) To prevent ambiguity a hyphen should be used in a compound adjective (e.g. first-class, six-inch, copper-coloured). The omission of a hyphen between ‘government’ and ‘financed’ in the following sentence throws the reader on to a false scent:

When government financed projects in the development areas have been grouped …

But remember that words forming parts of compound adjectives when they precede a noun may stand on their own feet when they follow it, and then they need not be hyphenated. A ‘second-hand car’ needs a hyphen, but ‘the car was second hand’ does not. There must be hyphens in ‘the balance-of-payment difficulties’ but not in ‘the difficulties are over the balance of payments’.

Note. Gowers’s advice here is not wrong, but nowadays many writers will do without the hyphen in a compound adjective before a noun if the resulting sentence remains unambiguous (‘When I went to the station to buy a first class ticket there was a tin pot dictator managing the queue’). If this is your habit, you must stay alert to the possibility of a misunderstanding. The idea was recently mooted that when universities weighed up applicants for places, pupils from ‘low-performing schools’ should be given an advantage over pupils from better schools. For want of a hyphen, one newspaper produced the following absurd account of the proposal: ‘Exam board suggested awarding bonus points to low-performing school students who get top grades’.

NB when adverbs that end in ly are used in descriptive compounds, they do not need a hyphen (‘a strongly worded complaint’; ‘a densely argued report’). ~

(3) Avoid as far as possible the practice of separating a pair of hyphenated words, leaving a hyphen in mid-air. To do this is to misuse the hyphen (whose proper function is to link a word with its immediate neighbour) and it has a slovenly look. The saving of one word cannot justify writing ‘where chaplains (whole- or part-time) have been appointed’. This should be, ‘where chaplains have been appointed, whole-time or part-time’.

INVERTED COMMAS

I have read nothing more sensible about inverted commas than this:

It is remarkable in an age peculiarly contemptuous of punctuation marks that we have not yet had the courage to abolish inverted commas … After all, they are a modern invention. The Bible is plain enough without them; and so is the literature of the eighteenth century. Bernard Shaw scorns them. However, since they are with us, we must do our best with them, always trying to reduce them to a minimum. (H. A. Treble and G. H. Vallins, An ABC of English Usage)

I have only two other things to say on this vexatious topic.

The first question is whether punctuation marks (including question and exclamation marks) should come before or after the inverted commas that close a quotation. This has been much argued, with no conclusive result. It does not seem to me of great practical importance, but I feel bound to refer to it, if only because a correspondent criticised me for giving no guidance on the matter in an earlier edition of this book, and accused me of being manifestly shaky about it myself. The truth is that there is no settled practice governing this most complicated subject. Pages were written about it by the Fowlers in The King’s English, but their conclusions are by no means universally accepted.

Most books on English advise that stops should be put in their logical positions. But what does that mean? There are two schools of thought. The first is exemplified, perhaps shakily, in this book, and is summarised below. Let us take this as our quotation:

I guarantee that the parcel will be delivered, and on time.

If this is quoted as a free-standing sentence, its own stops remain inside the inverted commas:

‘I guarantee’, he wrote, ‘that the parcel will be delivered,’ adding emphatically, ‘and on time.’

But if it is quoted as part of a longer sentence that embraces it, and the two end together with the same stop, the stop goes outside:

He wrote: ‘I guarantee that the parcel will be delivered, and on time’.

This applies even to a question mark:

How could he possibly write afterwards, ‘Why did you believe my guarantee’?

But if the two stops are different, a question mark trumps a full stop:

How could he possibly write afterwards, ‘I meant every word of it’?

He dared to write afterwards, ‘Why did you believe my guarantee?’

The second school of thought will not have this. Its adherents, including many publishers, dislike the look of stops outside inverted commas if they can possibly be put inside. But we need not concern ourselves here with questions of taste in printing. The drafter of official letters and memoranda is advised to stick to the principle of placing the punctuation marks according to the sense.*

The second thing I have to say on this topic is a repeat of my earlier warning against over-indulgence in the trick of encasing words or phrases in inverted commas to indicate that they are being used in a slang or technical or facetious or some other unusual sense. This is a useful occasional device; instances may be found in this book. But it is a dangerous habit.

Note. Many people would no doubt still agree with Gowers that inverted commas can be taken to indicate a facetious or an unusual sense. But anyone in this camp is at risk of being disconcerted by the numerous other people who now use inverted commas merely for emphasis. The danger is illustrated by an article on ‘the metrics of recruiting’:

With the role of human resources shifting from service and administration to strategic planning partner, we need to take on more accountability for how we impact the success of the business. The biggest impact we can make is on the ‘human’ resources the organization employs to maintain the business.

The phrase human resources is used here first to refer to the specialists who manage an entire workforce, and second, to the workers themselves. In the second instance, in an attempt to emphasise that the resources to be ‘impacted’ are of the living, breathing kind, the word human has been put in inverted commas. Yet the effect on those who read inverted commas to mean ‘please note that I am using this word facetiously’ will be the reverse of the one intended: to them it must seem that the workers are being dismissed—in an offensively conspiratorial manner—as somehow less than human. (Either way, the meaning of the second sentence appears to amount to little more than ‘In order to do our job we should do our job’.) ~

PARAGRAPHS

Letters, reports, memoranda and other documents would be unreadable if they were not divided into paragraphs, and much has been written on the art of paragraphing. But little of it helps the ordinary writer; the subject does not admit of precise guidance. The chief thing to remember is that, although paragraphing loses all point if the paragraphs are excessively long, the paragraph is essentially a unit of thought, not of length. For the sake of clarity, every paragraph should be homogeneous in subject matter, and sequential in treatment of it. If a single sequence of treatment of a single subject goes on so long as to make an unreasonably long paragraph, it may be divided into more than one. But you should not do the opposite, and combine into a single paragraph passages that have not this unity, even though each by itself may be below the average length of a paragraph.

PARENTHESIS

The purpose of a parenthesis is ordinarily to insert an illustration, explanation, definition, or additional piece of information of any sort, into a sentence that is logically and grammatically complete without it. A parenthesis may be marked off by commas, dashes or brackets. The degree of interruption of the main sentence will vary. Explanatory words that parallel the subject can be almost imperceptible:

Mr Smith, the secretary, read the minutes.

But the interruption may be the violent one of a separate sentence complete in itself:

A memorandum (six copies of this memorandum are enclosed for the information of the board) has been issued to management committees.

Parentheses should be used sparingly. Their very convenience is a reason for fighting shy of them. They enable writers to dodge the trouble of arranging their thoughts properly. But a writer’s thoughts are left badly arranged at the expense of the reader, especially if the thought that has been spatchcocked into the sentence forms an abrupt break in it, or a lengthy one, or both. The second of the two examples just given shows an illegitimate use of the parenthesis. The writer had no business to keep the reader waiting for the verb by throwing in a parenthesis that would have been put better as a separate sentence. The following examples are even worse:

to regard day nurseries and daily guardians as supplements to meet the special needs (where these exist and cannot be met within the hours, age, range and organisation of nursery schools and nursery classes) of children whose mothers are constrained by individual circumstances to go out to work …

If duties are however declined in this way, it will be necessary for the Board to consider whether it should agree to a modified contract in the particular case, or whether—because the required service can be provided only by the acceptance of the rejected obligations (e.g. by a whole-time radiologist to perform radiological examinations of paying patients in Section 5 beds in a hospital where the radiologists are all whole-time officers)—the Board should seek the services of another practitioner …

These are intolerable abuses of the parenthesis, the first with its interposition of twenty-one words in the middle of the phrase ‘needs of children’, and the second with its double parenthesis, more than forty words long, like two snakes eating each other. There was no need for either of these monstrosities. In both examples the main sentence should be allowed to finish without interruption, and what is now in the parenthesis, so far as it is worth saying, should be added at the end:

to regard day nurseries and daily guardians as supplements to meet the special needs of children whose mothers are constrained …and whose needs cannot be met …

or whether the Board should seek the services of another practitioner, as they will have to do if the required service can be provided only …

Here is a parenthesis that keeps the reader waiting so long for the verb that the subject is easily forgotten:

Close affiliation with University research in haematology—and it may be desirable that ultimately each Regional Transfusion Officer should have an honorary appointment in the department of pathology in the medical school—will help to attract into the service medical men of good professional standing.

In former days, when long and involved sentences were fashionable, it was customary after a lengthy parenthesis to put the reader on the road again by repeating the subject with the words ‘I say’. Thus the last example would run:

Close affiliation with University research in haematology—and it may be desirable that ultimately each Regional Transfusion Officer should have an honorary appointment in the department of pathology in the medical school—close affiliation with University research in haematology, I say, will help to attract into the service medical men …

Now that this handy device has fallen into disuse,* there is all the more need not to keep the reader waiting. There was no necessity to do so here. What is said as a parenthesis might just as well have been said as an independent sentence following the main one.

It is not only the reader but also the writer who sometimes forgets where the sentence was when the parenthesis started, as in the letter quoted in Chapter III:

owing to a shortage of a spare pair of wires to the underground cable (a pair of wires leading from the point near your house right back to the local exchange and thus a pair of wires essential for the provision of service for you) is lacking …

The writer imagined that the parenthesis started after the words ‘owing to the fact that a spare pair of wires to the underground cable’, and continued conformably afterwards.

QUESTION MARKS

Only direct questions need question marks. Indirect ones do not. There must be one at the end of ‘Have you completed your tax return?’ but not at the end of ‘I am writing to ask whether you have completed your tax return’.

It is usual to put question marks at the end of requests cast into question form for the sake of politeness. ‘Will you please let me know whether you have completed your tax return?’

SEMICOLON

Do not be afraid of the semicolon; it can be most useful. It marks a longer pause, a more definite break in the sense, than the comma; at the same time it says ‘Here is a clause or sentence too closely related to what has gone before to be cut off by a full stop’.

The semicolon is useful for avoiding the rather dreary trailing participles with which writers often end their sentences:

The postgraduate teaching hospitals are essentially national in their outlook, their geographical situation being merely incidental.

An attempt to devise permanent machinery for consultation was unsuccessful, the initial lukewarm response having soon disappeared.

There is nothing faulty in the grammar or syntax of these sentences, and the meaning of each is unambiguous. But they have a tired look. They can be wonderfully freshened by using the semicolon, and rewriting them:

The postgraduate teaching hospitals are essentially national in their outlook; their geographical situation is merely incidental.

An attempt to devise permanent machinery for consultation was unsuccessful; the initial lukewarm response soon disappeared.

Note. Gowers was a great advocate of the semicolon and used it liberally in his writing. But it is no longer popular, and many writers now do without it altogether. His first sentence above (‘Do not be afraid of the semicolon; it can be most useful’) would by most writers today probably be given in one of the following ways:

Do not be afraid of the semicolon. It can be most useful.

Do not be afraid of the semicolon as it can be most useful.

Do not be afraid of the semicolon: it can be most useful.

If it is really fear that is leading to the semicolon’s neglect, then this is fear at the expense of subtlety. In an address that Gowers gave in 1957, ‘H. W. Fowler: The Man and his Teaching’, he demonstrated a use of semicolons that cannot be bettered by any other style of punctuation. Gowers wished to tell the story of how Fowler lost his job as a schoolmaster. Fowler, who was not a professing Christian, had refused to prepare the boys in his charge for Confirmation, and as a result was overlooked for a housemastership when a post fell vacant. This is Gowers’s summary of what happened next:

He protested; the headmaster was firm; and Fowler resigned.

Here the semicolons quietly suggest that these episodes in Fowler’s life succeeded one another like toppling dominoes. ~

SENTENCES

A sentence is not easy to define. Many learned grammarians have tried, and their definitions have been torn to pieces by other learned grammarians. But what most of us understand by a sentence is what the OED calls the ‘popular’ definition: ‘such a portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another’. That definition is good enough for our present purposes, so the question we have to consider is the general guidance that can be given about what to put between one full stop and the next.

The two main things to be remembered about sentences if you want to make your meaning plain is that they should be short and should have unity of thought. Here is a series of eighty-six words between one full stop and another that violates all the canons of a good sentence. In fact this example might be said to explode the definition, for it would be flattering to call it a ‘sentence’. A friend who was good enough to look through this book in proof called it instead ‘gibberish’.

Forms are only sent to applicants whose requirements exceed one ton, and in future, as from tomorrow, forms will only be sent to firms whose requirements exceed five tons, and as you have not indicated what your requirements are, I am not sending you forms at the moment because it is just possible that your requirements may be well within these quantities quoted, in which case you may apply direct to the usual suppliers, of which there are several, with a view to obtaining your requirements.

If we prune this of its verbiage, and split it into three short sentences, a meaning will begin to emerge:

Only firms whose requirements exceed five tons now need forms. Others can apply direct to the suppliers. As you do not say what your requirements are I will not send you a form unless I hear that you need one.

The following is an even worse example of a meandering stream of words masquerading as a sentence:

Further to your letter of the above date and reference in connection with an allocation of …, as already pointed out to you all the allocations for this period have been closed, and I therefore regret that it is not possible to add to the existing allocation which has been made to you and which covers in toto your requirements for this period when originally received, by virtue of the work on which you are engaged, a rather higher percentage has been given to you, namely 100 per cent of the original requirements and at this stage I am afraid it is not practicable for you to increase the requirement for the reasons already given.

The fault here is more one of excessive verbiage than of combining into a single sentence what ought to have been given in several. Indeed the thought is simple. It can be conveyed simply thus:

Your original application was granted in full because of the importance of your work. I regret that the amount cannot now be increased, as allocation for this period has been closed.