IF WORDS ARE THE FLESH, MUSCLE, AND BONE OF PROSE, punctuation is the breath. In support of the words you’ve carefully selected, punctuation is your best means of conveying to the reader how you mean your writing to be read, how you mean for it to sound. A comma sounds different than a semicolon; parentheses make a different noise than dashes.
Some writers use as many bits of punctuation as they can think of. (The Mr. James quoted above often used so much of it, you’d think he was being paid by the dot and squiggle.) Some use as few as they can get away with.
Some writers use punctuation with impressionistic flair, and as a copy editor I do my best to support that, so long as the result is comprehensible and consistent.*1 Not all punctuation is discretionary, though. Typing or not typing even so much as a comma—in fact, especially a comma—can convey key information. The more regular and, you’ll pardon the word, conventional your writing, the more, I’d suggest, you use punctuation in a regular and conventional fashion.
A general note: I’ll cover here the punctuational issues/
Another general note, which also happens to be a cultural one: I’ve observed over these last few decades that writers of all sorts use increasingly less punctuation. I guess it’s part of the common tendency to be in a great big hurry. No harm with that reduction, and I’m sure you’ll find some other use for this comma or that hyphen.
PERIODS
1.
Q. Two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence, right?
A. Wrong. I know that back when you were in seventh-grade typing class and pecking away at your Smith Corona Coronet Automatic 12, Mrs. Tegnell taught you to type a double space after a sentence-ending period, but you are no longer in the seventh grade, you are no longer typing on a typewriter, and Mrs. Tegnell is no longer looking over your shoulder. Either break yourself of the habit or, once you’ve finished writing whatever it is you’re writing, do a global search-and-exterminate for double spaces, which will dispose of not only end-of-sentence offenders but those that have crept into your text between words as you cut, copied, pasted, and otherwise revised. If you don’t, I will.*2
2.
The fashion of punctuating acronyms and initialisms*3 with periods has, well, gone out of fashion, so one is far less likely nowadays to see F.B.I. than FBI, U.N.E.S.C.O. than UNESCO, etc. Insofar as academic degrees are concerned, I’m less keen on BA, MD, and PhD (rather than B.A., M.D., and Ph.D.), though I’m getting used to them, especially for the sorts of degrees that run to four or more letters, and especially in the service of those learned sorts who festoon their names with multiple degrees,*4 and am happy to save my instinctual squabbling for something else.*5
3.
Those two-letter state abbreviations that the USPS—which I’m still tempted to style U.S.P.S. but won’t—likes to see on envelopes (MA, NY, CA, and the like) do not take periods. They also shouldn’t appear anywhere else but on envelopes and packages. In bibliographies and notes sections, and anywhere else you may need to abbreviate a state’s name, please stick to the old-fashioned and more attractive Mass., N.Y., Calif., and so on. Or just be a grown-up and write the whole thing out.
4.
Some of us have a hard time dropping the periods from the abbreviation U.S., perhaps simply out of habit, perhaps because US looks to us like the (shouted) objective case of “we.” Some of us were also taught to use U.S. (or that other thing) only as an adjective, as in “U.S. foreign policy,” and to refer to the country nounwise only full-out as the United States. I persist in that distinction, because…because I do.
5.
Feel free to end a sentence shaped like a question that isn’t really a question with a period rather than a question mark. It makes a statement, doesn’t it.
COMMAS
6.
On arrival at Random House, I was taught that we had no house style. That is, each manuscript got the attentive copyedit it uniquely needed, and copy editors didn’t perform any one-size-fits-all-whether-you-like-it-or-not Bed of Procrustes routine, applying this or that particular rule of punctuation, grammar, etc., to every manuscript, regardless of its needs, in the service of some house-proud notion of universal correctness.
Well, that was not entirely true. We did have one house standard, to be applied to each and every manuscript we squired through the process:
THE SERIES COMMA
The series comma is the comma that separates the last two bits in a list of words or phrases before the concluding conjunction “and” or “or” or sometimes even “but,” as in:
apples, pears, oranges, tangerines, tangelos, bananas, and cherries
The “bananas, and” comma. That’s the series comma.
Quite possibly you know this comma as the Oxford comma—because, we’re told, it’s traditionally favored by the editors of the University of Oxford Press. But as a patriotic American, and also because that attribution verges on urbane legendarianism, I’m loath to perpetuate that story. Or you may be familiar with the term “serial comma,” though for me “serial” evokes “killer,” so no again.
Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don’t want to belabor the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it. Only godless savages eschew the series comma.
No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one.
In a tote-up of grocery items, as above, the series comma ensures that the final two items in a list aren’t seen as having a special relationship, aren’t seen after a number of singletons as somehow constituting a couple. In a more complicated sentence, the use of the series comma simply makes it clear that once I’ve made some particularly deft point, deftly said everything I have to say on the subject, and moved on to a final deft point, the reader doesn’t trip from the penultimate deft point to the ultimate deft point thinking that it’s all one big deft point.
Many journalist types, I’ve observed, abhor the series comma because they’ve been trained to abhor it and find its use as maddening as its champions find its nonuse infuriating. Many Brits, including even Oxford Brits, also avoid it. For whatever it’s worth to you, everyone I’ve ever encountered in U.S. book publishing uses it.
One thing, though: Commas can’t do everything, not even series commas. There’s a sentence, reputed to have shown up in The Times,*6 often schlepped out in defense of the series comma, and though I’m weary of seeing it, I schlep it out myself to point out its weakness as a series-comma defense. So here it is, hopefully for the last time in all our lives, though I doubt it:
Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.
Oh la la, one is intended to merrily note, is Nelson Mandela really an eight-hundred-year-old demigod and a dildo collector?
Oh la la, I note, even if one sets a series comma, as in:
Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod, and a dildo collector.
Mandela can still be an eight-hundred-year-old demigod.
Some sentences don’t need to be repunctuated; they need to be rewritten.*7
7.
Re the school of “Apply the series comma when it’s needed for clarity and not when it’s not needed for clarity”:
7a. One person’s clarity is another person’s “Huh?” Writers who profess to adhere to this notion, I find, often apply the series comma precisely where it might be skipped with no loss in clarity and skip it precisely where it’s desperately needed.
7b. It uses up fewer brain cells simply to apply the damn thing every time, brain cells that might well be applied in the cure of more serious issues, like grammatical blunders and one’s overuse of the word “murmur.”
8.
Exception to the rule: An ampersand in a series rather than an “and”—this sort of thing tends to turn up in book or film titles, the names of law firms (and other companies that want to invest themselves with the cachet of law firms), and nowhere else, but it’s a thing to know—negates the necessity of a series comma, mostly because the result would be unsightly. Thus, oh, say:
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
and certainly not
Eats, Shoots, & Leaves
which is a bit belt-and-suspenders, don’t you think?
9.
You might well, if you’re relatively sparing with your commas, write
On Friday she went to school.
or
Last week Laurence visited his mother.
So long as the commaless rendition is clear and understandable, you’re on safe ground.
The longer the introductory bit, the more likely you are to want/need a comma:
After three days home sick with a stomachache, she returned to school.
On his way back from a business trip, Laurence visited his mother.
10.
But do avoid crashing proper nouns, as in
In June Truman’s secretary of state flew to Moscow.
Lest you want your reader wondering who June Truman is and what precisely got into her secretary of state.
Or take note of the sentence above I initially composed as beginning, “On arrival at Random House I was informed,” which might set you, if only for a millisecond, to speculating about Random House II and Random House III.*8
11.
Sometimes a comma makes no sense at all.
Suddenly, he ran from the room.
Makes it all rather less sudden, doesn’t it.
12.
A comma splice is the use of a comma to join two sentences when each can stand on its own—as in, just picking an example out of more or less thin air:
She did look helpless, I almost didn’t blame him for smiling at her that special way.*9
As a rule you should avoid comma splicing, though exceptions can be and frequently are made when the individual sentences are reasonably short and intimately connected: “He came, he saw, he conquered” or “Your strengths are your weaknesses, your weaknesses are your strengths.” Another exception arises in fiction or fictionlike writing in which such a splice may be effective in linking closely related thoughts or expressing hurried action and even a semicolon—more on the glorious semicolon below—is more pause than is desired.
Another thin-air example, from Walter Baxter’s undeservedly obscure 1951 novel Look Down in Mercy:
He had never noticed [the sunset] before, it seemed fantastically beautiful.
As comma splices go, this one’s not doing anyone any harm, and there’s no issue here with comprehension, so let’s let it go.
The result of a comma splice is known as—and you may well recall this term from middle school English class—a run-on sentence. One may meet a fair number of people who like to aim that term at any old sentence that happens to be long and twisty and made up of any number of innumerable bits divided by semicolons, dashes, parentheses, and whatever else the writer may have had on hand. Nay. A long sentence is a long sentence, it’s only a run-on sentence when it’s not punctuated in the standard fashion. Like that one just now.
13.
The vocative comma—or the comma of direct address—is the comma separating a bit of speech from the name (or title or other identifier) of the person (or sometimes the thing) being addressed. As commas go, it’s not particularly controversial. No one—at least no one I’d care to associate with—would favor
I’ll meet you in the bar Charlie.
over
I’ll meet you in the bar, Charlie.
Right?
And so it goes with “Good afternoon, Mabel,” “I live to obey, Your Majesty,” “Please don’t toss me into the hoosegow, Your Honor,” and “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too.”
And yet—there’s always an “and yet”—while copyediting one frequently runs into the likes of
And Dad, here’s another thing.
or
But Mom, you said we could go to the movies.*10
which one invariably corrects to
And, Dad, here’s another thing.
and
But, Mom, you said we could go to the movies.
Copy editors periodically run into pushback—generally accompanied by a put-out “But my rhythm!”—on that comma, but they should hold firm, and writers should get over themselves. It’s just a comma, and it’s a proper and meaningful comma, and no one’s pausing in midsentence to take a walk around the block.*11
This is as good a place as any, I suppose, to note that honorifics either attached to names or used in place of them should be capped,*12 as in the aforementioned
I live to obey, Your Majesty.
and
Please don’t toss me into the hoosegow, Your Honor.
Similarly, when one is speaking to one’s mother or father:
I live to obey, Mom.
and
Please don’t toss me into the hoosegow, Dad.
But: A passing casual reference, not in direct address, to one’s mom or dad does not require a capital letter.
A bit of copyeditorial controversy tends to pop up when a writer offers something like:
I’m on my way to visit my Aunt Phyllis.
Which many copy editors will attempt to downgrade to:
I’m on my way to visit my aunt Phyllis.
Writers tend to balk at this sort of thing, and I tend to side with them. I myself had an aunt named Phyllis, and so far as I was concerned, her name was Aunt Phyllis. And thus I refer to her, always, as my Aunt Phyllis.*13
On the other hand, I’d be more than happy to refer to “my grandmother Maude,” because that is who she was, not what she was called.*14
Note, by the way, that I do not refer to “my grandmother, Maude,” as I—like everyone else, I suppose—had two grandmothers.*15 Though I might well refer to “my maternal grandmother, Maude.” (See “The ‘Only’ Comma,” in Section 16, below.)
14.
We were all thoroughly indoctrinated in grade school to precede or follow dialogue with a comma in constructions like
Atticus said dryly, “Do not let this inspire you to further glory, Jeremy.”
or
“Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar.
It should be noted, though, that this rule does not apply in constructions in which dialogue is preceded or followed by some version of the verb “to be” (“is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” that lot), as in:
Lloyd’s last words were “That tiger looks highly pettable.”
or
“Happy New Year” is a thing one ought to stop saying after January 8.
In each of these cases, the phrase in question is less dialogue than a noun-in-quote-marks, and thus no comma is called for.
15.
Will you go to London too?
Will you go to London, too?
Q. When do I precede a sentence-ending “too” with a comma, and when not?
A. Whichever you choose, the other way will look better.
I spent a great many years periodically revisiting my big fat stylebooks in an attempt to get it into my head how to properly do the “too” thing, and the explanations never sank in. In the examples above, does one of them mean “Will you go to London as well as Paris?” and does one of them mean “Will you as well as your mother go to London?” I haven’t the foggiest. So to blazes with it. If you can hear a comma before the “too,” feel free to use it. If you can’t, feel free to not.
16.
THE “ONLY” COMMA
If a writer writes a sentence like
He traveled to Pompeii with his daughter Clara.
a copy editor will, if the fact is not already known to the copy editor, query in the margin:
AU: Only daughter? If so, comma.
Thus the comma I choose to refer to—since I am perpetually confused by the grammar terms “restrictive” and “nonrestrictive” and can never remember which is meant to be which—as the “only” comma.
“Only” commas (except at the very ends of sentences, they travel in pairs) are used to set off nouns that are, indeed, the only one of their kind in the vicinity, as in, say,
Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert, was born on August 1, 1843.
The notion being that as one can have only one eldest son, his name in this sentence is an interesting, noteworthy, yet inessential piece of information. Thus if I encounter
Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son was born on August 1, 1843.
there can be no question that it’s Robert who is being spoken of, rather than the subsequent Edward or Willie or Tad, whether Robert is named or not.
Conversely, in a sentence lacking the unique modifier “eldest,” one must be told which son is being spoken of, thus:
Lincoln’s son Robert was an eyewitness to the assassination of President Garfield.
Or, say:
George Saunders’s book Lincoln in the Bardo concerns the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie.
Again, it’s crucial, not merely interesting, that we know which of Abraham Lincoln’s sons is being spoken of, and that the son in question is not Robert, Edward, or Tad.
At the other end of the spectrum, then, be careful not to set an “only” comma where there is no only-ness, as in, say:
The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, Edith Wharton, was born in New York City.
Because Mrs. Wharton is merely one of many winners of the Pulitzer, there should be no “only” comma.
17.
The “only” comma rule is also helpful in differentiating between “that” and “which,” if differentiating between “that” and “which” is your bag.
If you’re about to offer a piece of information that’s crucial to your sentence, offer it up without a comma and with a “that”:
Please fetch me the Bible that’s on the table.
Which is to say: Fetch me the Bible that is on the table rather than the Bible that’s under the couch or the Bible that’s poised picturesquely on the window seat.
If you’re offering a piece of information that’s perhaps interesting amplification but might well be deleted without harm, offer it up with a comma and a “which”:
Please fetch me the Bible, which is on the table.
One Bible and one Bible only.
The “that” vs. “which” rule is not universally observed, I must note. Some writers find it pushily constricting and choose between the two by ear. I find it helpful and, admiring consistency as I do, apply it consistently.
18.
What goes up must come down, and that which commences with a comma, if it is an interruption, must also end with one, as in:
Queen Victoria, who by the end of her reign ruled over a good fifth of the world’s population, was the longest-reigning monarch in British history till Elizabeth II surpassed her record in 2015.
It’s that comma after “population” I’m wanting you to keep a good eye on, because it has a tendency to go missing. It’s so frequently omitted in published British prose that for a long time I thought they had some national rule against it. They don’t. They’re just sloppy.
That concluding comma has a particular tendency to get forgotten in sentences in which a parenthetical has been stuffed, turducken-like, into the interrupting bit, as in:
Queen Victoria, who by the end of her reign ruled over a good fifth of the world’s population (not all of whom were her own relatives, though it often seemed that way), was the longest-reigning monarch in British history till Elizabeth II surpassed her record in 2015.
That error gets past reasonably adept copy editors with a bit too much frequency, so be better than reasonably adept copy editors, please.
COLONS
Colons are not merely introductory but presentational. They say: Here comes something! Think of colons as little trumpet blasts, attention-getting and ear-catching. Also loud. So don’t use so many of them that you give your reader a headache.
19.
If what follows a colon is a full sentence, begin that full sentence with a capital letter, which signals to your reader: What’s about to commence includes a subject, a verb, the works, and should be read as such.
Post-colon lists of things or fragmentary phrases should begin with a lowercase letter: items on a grocery list, the novels of a particular author, etc.
This differentiation is by no means universally recommended, much less observed, and writers who were trained to commence anything that follows a colon with a lowercase letter (a convention I find puzzling, as if suggesting that a sentence following a colon is somehow not a legitimate sentence) bristle at it, but I consider it a valuable way to signal to readers what flavor of text they’re about to read and to avoid sending them scurrying grumpily back to the colon once they realize that what they thought was going to be a sentence isn’t one, or that what they thought wasn’t going to be a sentence is one.
APOSTROPHES
20.
Before we get to what you do use apostrophes for, let’s recount what you don’t use them for.
Step back, I’m about to hit the CAPS LOCK key.
DO NOT EVER ATTEMPT TO USE AN APOSTROPHE TO PLURALIZE A WORD.
“NOT EVER” AS IN “NEVER.”
You may reapproach.
Directing their disapproval toward miswritten produce signs advertising “banana’s” and “potato’s” (or “potatoe’s” or even “potato’es”), the Brits have dubbed such incorrectly wielded squiggles “greengrocer’s apostrophes.” In America, where we don’t have greengrocers, we should, I’d say, call them something else. The term I was first taught was “idiot apostrophe,”*16 but that’s not really nice, is it.
Let’s simply call them errant apostrophes. Which is kind of classy, don’t you think?*17
In any event, don’t use them. Not for bananas, potatoes, bagels, princesses, Trumans, Adamses, Obamas, or whatever else you’ve got more than one of.
For a modest monthly fee I will come to wherever you are, and when, in an attempt to pluralize a word,*18 you so much as reach for the apostrophe key, I will slap your hand.
21.
The pluralization of abbreviations, too, requires no apostrophes. More than one CD = CDs. More than one ID = IDs. More than one ATM = ATMs. Etc.
22.
To say nothing of dos and don’ts, yeses and nos, etc.*19
23.
There’s no such word as “their’s.” Or “your’s.”
24.
Here comes a major on-the-other-hand, though: Do use an apostrophe to pluralize a letter.
One minds one’s p’s and q’s.
One dots one’s i’s and crosses one’s t’s.
One brings home on one’s report card four B’s and two C’s.*20
25.
I’ll wager you’re adept at the use of apostrophes for simple possessives:
the dog’s toy
Meryl Streep’s umpteenth Oscar
As to common—that is, not proper—nouns ending with an s, one doesn’t, at least not in recently published text,*21 encounter the likes of
the boss’ office
the princess’ tiara
which I find positively spooky-looking, and for most of us, then,
the boss’s office
the princess’s tiara
is the no-brainer way to go.
Trouble knocks at the door, though, when terminal s’s occur at the ends of proper nouns. When the talk turns to, say, the writer of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend or the urban activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities or the nemesis of said urban activist and author, how do we style their ownership?
Well, I can certainly tell you how I style them:
Charles Dickens’s novels
Jane Jacobs’s advocacy
Robert Moses’s megalomania
Though you may come across much discussion elsewhere regarding the appending or not appending of post-apostrophe s’s based on pronunciation,*22 convention, or what day of the week it is, I think you’ll find that, as with the universal application of the series comma, you’ll save yourself a lot of thinking time by not thinking about these s’s and just applying them.
I’d even urge you to set aside the Traditional Exceptions for Antiquity and/or Being the Son of God and go with:
Socrates’s
Aeschylus’s
Xerxes’s
Jesus’s
26.
A warning:
Hasty typing fingers are apt to render the likes of
Jane Jacobs’s activism
as
Jane Jacob’s activism
As typos go, that sort of thing is perilously easy to commit and to overlook. Be careful.
27.
THE POSSESSIVIZATION OF DONALD TRUMP, JR.
A GRAND GUIGNOL IN ONE ACT
In July 2017 one of our nation’s preëminent if perhaps somewhat self-delightedly parochial magazines foisted upon the world this headline:
DONALD TRUMP, JR.,’S LOVE FOR RUSSIAN DIRT
The writer Michael Colton, in an aghast tweet, identified this particular method of rendering a possessive “period-comma-apostrophe bullshit,” which may not be the precise technical term for it but which does just fine anyway.
Let me say this about that:
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
If you are a younger or more forward-thinking person, you may already render the names of photocopied offspring commalessly, thus:
Donald Trump Jr.
In which case you’ve got it easy:
Donald Trump Jr. is a perfidious wretch.
and thus:
Donald Trump Jr.’s perfidy
Old-school construction, though, sets off a “Jr.”*23 with commas, as in:
Donald Trump, Jr., is a perfidious wretch.
When possessivizing such a person, your options are
-
that horror noted above, which I’ll refrain from repeating
-
Donald Trump, Jr.’s perfidy (which is admittedly a little unbalanced)
-
Donald Trump, Jr.’s, perfidy (better balanced, and at least not eye-stabbingly ugly)
You choose.*24
28.
Let’s move on to plural proper noun possessives, over which many tears have been shed, particularly around Christmas-card time.
First we have to properly construct the plurals themselves. So then:
Harry S. and Bess Truman = the Trumans
John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy = the Kennedys*25
Barack H. and Michelle Obama = the Obamas
And, lurching backward to the birth of our republic:
John and Abigail Adams = the Adamses
The pluralization of s-ending proper nouns seems to trip up a lot of people, but John and Abigail are the Adamses, as are John Quincy and Louisa, as are Rutherford B. and Lucy the Hayeses, and that seems to be that for s-ending presidents, but you get the point.
People who are perfectly content to keep up with the Joneses—and I’ll wager the Joneses are good and tired of receiving Christmas cards addressed to “the Jones’s”—sometimes balk at the sight of the Adamses, the Hayeses, the Reynoldses, the Dickenses, and the rest, but balk all you like, that’s how the game is played.*26 If it’s bothersome to you, you may address your Christmas card to, say, “the Adams family.”
As to the possessives, then, a relative piece of cake:
the Trumans’ singing daughter
the Adamses’ celebrated correspondence
the Dickenses’ trainwreck of a marriage
29.
If Jeanette has some pencils and Nelson has some pencils and Jeanette and Nelson are not sharing their pencils, those pencils are:
Jeanette’s and Nelson’s pencils
But if Jeanette and Nelson reject individual ownership and pursue a socialist policy of collectivization for the betterment of humankind, those pencils are now:
Jeanette and Nelson’s pencils
Well, truly I suppose they’re then the people’s pencils, but you get the point.
30.
Q. Is it “farmer’s market” or “farmers’ market” or “farmers market”?
A. I’m presuming there’s more than one farmer, so out goes “farmer’s market.”
As to the other two, is it a market belonging to farmers or a market made up of farmers?
I say the latter, so:
farmers market*27
(I’m reasonably, hopefully certain that no one will mistake a farmers market as a market in which one might purchase a farmer.)
31.
Though it has its champions, the style decision to elide a title’s The in a possessive construction, as in:
Carson McCullers’s Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
will always make me wrinkle my nose, and it can lead to such eyebrow raisers as
James Joyce’s Dead
which looks to me like either a shocked headline or a bit of Dublin toilet graffiti.
SEMICOLONS
32.
I love semicolons like I love pizza; fried pork dumplings; Venice, Italy; and the operas of Puccini.
Why does the sentence above include semicolons?
Because the most basic use of semicolons is to divide the items in a list any of whose individual elements mandate a comma—in this case, Venice, Italy.
Now, I might certainly have avoided semicolons by reordering the elements in the list, thus:
I love semicolons like I love pizza, fried pork dumplings, the operas of Puccini, and Venice, Italy.
But semicolons are unavoidable when you must write the likes of:
Lucy’s favorite novels are Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Farewell, My Lovely; and One Time, One Place.
Because:
Lucy’s favorite novels are Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Farewell, My Lovely, and One Time, One Place.
Well, how many novels is that, anyway? Three? Five?
Lucy has fascinating taste in novels, I have to say.
But if that were the sum total use of semicolons, they would not invite, from certain writers who should certainly know better, stuffy derision.
For instance:
Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.*28
I counter this with a lovely remark by author Lewis Thomas from The Medusa and the Snail:
The things I like best in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
I’ve been known to insist that the only thing one needs to say in defense of semicolons is that Shirley Jackson liked them.*29 In support of that, I’ve also been known to whip out this, the opening paragraph of Jackson’s masterwork The Haunting of Hill House:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.*30
One paragraph, three semicolons. One might, I suppose, have replaced those semicolons with periods and started each following clause anew, as an independent sentence. The result, though, would have been the unmooring, the disconnection, of these tightly woven, almost claustrophobic ideas, and a paragraph that grabs you by the hand and marches you from beginning to end would have devolved into a collection of plain old sentences.
While we’re here, I’d also like to celebrate that paragraph’s final comma, perhaps my favorite piece of punctuation in all of literature. One might argue that it’s unnecessary—even grammatically uncalled-for—but there it is, the last breath of the paragraph, the author’s way of saying, “This is your last chance to set this book down and go do something else, like work in your garden or stroll down the street for an ice cream cone. Because from this point on it’s just you, and me, and whatever it is that walks, and walks alone, in Hill House.”
I dare you to walk away.
PARENTHESES
33.
A midsentence parenthetical aside (like this one) begins with a lowercase letter and concludes (unless it’s a question or even an exclamation!) without terminal punctuation.
When a fragmentary parenthetical aside comes at the very end of a sentence, make sure that the period stays outside the aside (as here).
(Only a freestanding parenthetical aside, like this one, begins with a capital letter and concludes with an appropriate bit of terminal punctuation inside the final parenthesis.)
34.
This is correct:
Remind me again why I care what this feckless nonentity (and her eerie husband) think about anything.
This is not correct:
Remind me again why I care what this feckless nonentity (and her eerie husband) thinks about anything.
An “and” is an “and,” and the use of parentheses (or commas or dashes) to break up a plural subject for whatever reason does not negate the pluralness of the subject. Now, if instead of writing “and,” I’d written “to say nothing of,” “as well as,” or “not to mention,” then I’d have made me a singular subject:
Remind me again why I care what this feckless nonentity (to say nothing of her eerie husband) thinks about anything.*31
35.
TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE; OR, DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
As a serial abuser of parentheses, I warn you against their overuse, particularly in the conveyance of elbow-nudging joshingness. One too many coy asides and you, in the person of your writing, will seem like a dandy in a Restoration comedy stepping down to the footlights and curling his hand around his mouth to confidentially address the audience. One rather needs a beauty mark and a peruke to get away with that sort of thing.
36.
A magazine journalist of my acquaintance once confided that he avoided parentheticals because his editor, when looking to cut words in the interests of minimizing the writer’s use of precious print real estate, would home in on them and delete, delete, delete.
BRACKETS
37.
Brackets—or square brackets, as they’re called by people who call parentheses “round brackets”—serve a limited but crucial purpose.
First: If you find yourself making a parenthetical comment within a parenthetical comment, the enclosed parenthetical comment is set within brackets. But it’s extraordinarily unattractive on the page (I try to find a way around it [I mean, truly, do you like the way this looks?], at least whenever I can), so avoid it.
Second: Any time you find yourself interpolating a bit of your own text into quoted material (a helpfully added clarifying first name, for instance, when the original text contained only a surname) or in any other way altering a quotation, you must—and I mean must—enclose your interpolation in brackets.*32
Ah yes, there’s an exception, as there always is: If in the context of what you’re writing you have need to change, in quoted material, a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence to a lowercase one, or vice versa, you may do that without brackets.
That is, if you’re quoting George Bernard Shaw’s “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it,” you’re well within your rights to refer to Shaw’s observation that “patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction,” etc., etc.
And in the other direction, quoting Shaw’s “All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity,” you’re allowed to do this:
“Nothing is so cruel as impunity,” Shaw once commented.
The exception to the exception arises in cases of legal documents and extreme and especially contentious scholarship in which you need to keep your nose utterly clean; then you’ll find yourself doing this sort of thing:
Shaw once wrote that “[a]ll government is cruel.”
I can’t say it’s pretty, but it gets the job done.
39.
[SIC] BURNS
Let’s take a moment to talk about [sic]. Sic is Latin for “thus,” and one uses it—traditionally in italics, always in brackets—in quoted material to make it clear to your reader that a misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact you’re retaining for the sake of authenticity in said quoted material is indeed not your misspelling or eccentricity or error of fact but that of the person you’re quoting. As, for instance and strictly speaking, you might do here, in quoting this piece of text I 100 percent made up out of thin air and didn’t find on, say, Twitter:
Their [sic] was no Collusion [sic] and there was no Obstruction [sic].
But seriously now:
If you’re quoting a lot of, say, seventeenth-century writing in which there are numerous old-fashioned-isms you wish to retain, you’d do well, somewhere around the beginning of what you’re writing, perhaps in an author’s note or a footnote, to make it clear that you’re quoting your venerable material verbatim. That’ll save you a lot of [sic]ing, though you might occasionally drop in a [sic] for an error or peculiarity whose misreading or misinterpretation might truly be confounding to your reader.
Writers of nonfiction occasionally choose, when they’re quoting a good deal of archaic or otherwise peculiar material, to silently correct outmoded spellings or misspellings, irregular capitalization, eccentric or absent punctuation, etc. I’m not a huge fan of this practice—mostly because I think it’s not as much fun as retaining all that flavorful weirdness—though I can understand why you might do it in a work of nonfiction that’s meant to be popular rather than scholarly. If you’re going to do it, again, let the reader know up front. It’s only fair.
Do not—not as in never—use [sic] as a snide bludgeon to suggest that something you’re quoting is dopey. By which I mean the very meaning of the words, not merely their spelling. You may think you’re getting in a good shot at a writer whose judgment you find shaky; the only person whose judgment is going to seem shaky, I’d suggest, is you.
It’s the prose equivalent of an I’M WITH STUPID T-shirt and just about as charming.
And for pete’s sake, if you’re an American quoting British writing, or vice versa, please do not do the following, as I once, hand to God, saw in a U.K. newspaper:
…which it said had been “a labor [sic] of love.”
QUOTATION MARKS
When I was a youth growing up in Albertson, Long Island, a virtually undetectable suburb of New York City, my mother would regularly send me off on my Schwinn to the nearby bakery for a rye bread (sliced) or a challah (unsliced) or six rolls for eight cents each (or was it eight rolls for six cents each?) and, on the best days, a box of black-and-whites. (Black-and-white cookies, as gentiles of my acquaintance tend to call them.)
In the bakery, above the rye bread, was a sign that read:
TRY OUR RUGELACH! IT’S THE “BEST!”
I was fascinated. This, as they say in the comic books, is my origin story.
So, then, to break it down for you:
40.
Use roman (straight up and down, that is, like the font this phrase is printed in) type encased in quotation marks for the titles of songs, poems, short stories, and episodes of TV series.*33 Whereas the titles of music albums,*34 volumes of poetry, full-length works of fiction and nonfiction, and TV series themselves are styled in aslant italics.
“Court and Spark”
Court and Spark
“Song of Myself”
Leaves of Grass
“The Lottery”
The Lottery and Other Stories
“Chuckles Bites the Dust”
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (also known as, simply, Mary Tyler Moore)
It’s a fairly simple system, then: little things in roman and quotes, bigger things in italics.*35
41.
Individual works of art—named paintings and sculptures—are generally set in italics (The Luncheon on the Grass), though works whose titles are unofficial (the Victory of Samothrace, for instance) are often styled in roman, without quotation marks.*36
42.
One also sets off dialogue with quotation marks, though some writers (E. L. Doctorow, William Gaddis, and Cormac McCarthy come immediately to mind) like to do without, to which I simply say: To pull that off, you have to be awfully good at differentiating between narration and dialogue.
43.
Once upon a time, what I’d call articulated rumination was often found encased in quotation marks:
“What is to become of me?” Estelle thought.
Though that, over time, gave way to this:
What is to become of me? Estelle thought.
And now, more often than not, you’ll simply see:
What is to become of me? Estelle thought.*37
That last is best.*38
44.
One does not, as in the rugelach example cited above, use quotation marks for emphasis. That is why God invented italics.
Such quotation marks do not, strictly speaking, come under the heading of scare quotes, which are quotation marks used to convey that the writer finds a term too slangish to sit on its own (I have old books in which young people listen not to jazz but to “jazz”; it makes me chortle every time) and/or is sneering at it. Avoid scare quotes. They’ll make you look snotty today and, twenty years on, snotty and comically obsolete.*39
45.
Do not use quotation marks after the term “so-called.” For instance, I’m not
a so-called “expert” in matters copyeditorial
I’m simply a
so-called expert in matters copyeditorial
The quotation-marking of something following “so-called” is not only redundant but makes a likely already judgmental sentence even more so.
Though I won’t object if you feel compelled, as I often do, to use quotation marks after a “known as,” particularly if you’re introducing a strange or newfangled term. For example, I might refer to
the long-haired, free-loving, peace-marching young folk known as “hippies”
if, that is, I were writing in 1967.*40
46.
In referring to a word or words as, indeed, a word or words, some people go with quotation marks and some people prefer italics, as in:
The phrase “the fact that” is to be avoided.
or
The phrase the fact that is to be avoided.
The former is a bit chattier, I think, more evocative of speech, the latter a bit more technical- and textbooky-looking. It’s a matter of taste.
47.
An exclamation point or question mark at the end of a sentence ending with a bit of quoted matter goes outside rather than inside the quotation marks if the exclamation point or question mark belongs to the larger sentence rather than to the quoted bit, as in:
As you are not dear to me and we are not friends, please don’t ever refer to me as “my dear friend”!
or
Were Oscar Wilde’s last words truly “Either that wallpaper goes or I do”?*41
What happens when both the quoted material and the surrounding sentence demand emphatic or inquiring punctuation? Does one truly write
You’ll be sorry if you ever again say to me, “But you most emphatically are my dear friend!”!
or
Were Oscar Wilde’s last words truly “I’m dying, do you seriously think I want to talk about the decor?”?
No, one does not. One makes a choice as to where the ! or the ? might more effectively reside. (In the examples above, I’d opt to retain the second exclamation point and the first question mark.) Or one simply rewrites to avoid the collision entirely.
48.
In American English, we reach first for double quotation marks, as I’ve been doing above all this time. If one finds the need to quote something within quotation marks, one then opts for single quotation marks. As in:
“I was quite surprised,” Jeannine commented, “when Mabel said to me, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow for Chicago,’ then walked out the door.”
Should one find oneself with yet another layer of quoted material, one would then revert to double quote marks, thus:
“I was quite surprised,” Jeannine commented, “when Mabel said to me, ‘I’ve found myself lately listening over and over to the song “Chicago,” ’ then proceeded to sing it.”
Do, though, try to avoid this matryoshka punctuation; it’s hard on the eye and on the brain.
Moreover, I caution you generally, re quotes within quotes: It’s quite easy to lose track of what you’re doing and set double quotes within double quotes. Be wary.
49.
Though semicolons, because they are elusive and enigmatic and they like it that way, are set outside terminal quotation marks, periods and commas—and if I make this point once, I’ll make it a thousand times, and trust me, I will—are always set inside.
Always.
HYPHENS
50.
If you turn to p. 719 in your Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition, you will find, one atop the other:
light-headed
lighthearted
Which tells you pretty much everything you want to know about the use of hyphens, which is to say: It doesn’t make much sense, does it.
If you type “lightheaded” (I note that my spellcheck dots have not popped up) or “light-hearted,” the hyphen police are surely not going to come after you, and I won’t even notice, but:
If you’re invested in getting your hyphens correctly sorted out in compound adjectives, verbs, and nouns, and you like being told what to do, just pick up your dictionary and look ’em up. Those listings are correct.
51.
That said, you will find—if you’ve a penchant for noticing these things, professionally or otherwise—that compounds have a tendency, over time, to spit out unnecessary hyphens and close themselves up. Over the course of my career I’ve seen “light bulb” evolve into “light-bulb” and then into “lightbulb,” “baby-sit” give way to “babysit,” and—a big one—“Web site” turn into “Web-site,” then, happily, “website.”*42
How and why do these changes occur? I’ll let you in on a little secret: Because you make them happen. Yes, you, right there. You grow impatient with the looks of, say, “rest room” (“I mean, it’s not a room you rest in, is it?”), so you stick a hyphen in it, coexist with “rest-room” for about twenty minutes, then quickly tire of the hyphen and, boom, “restroom.” Multiply this times hundreds of compounds, and watch the language whoosh into the future before your very eyes. Then watch the dictionary keep up with you, because that’s how it works. As a lexicographer friend once confided over sushi, the dictionary takes its cues from use: If writers don’t change things, the dictionary doesn’t change things.
If you want your best-seller to be a bestseller, you have to help make that happen. If you want to play videogames rather than video games, go for it.
I hope that makes you feel powerful. It should.
52.
If that revelation didn’t make you go all lightheaded, let’s hunker down and focus on a few particular points.
For the sake of clarity, we use hyphens to helpfully link up a pair or passel of words preceding and modifying a noun, as in:
first-rate movie
fifth-floor apartment
middle-class morality
nasty-looking restaurant
all-you-can-eat buffet
However, convention (a.k.a. tradition, a.k.a. consensus, a.k.a. it’s simply how it’s done, so don’t argue with it) allows for exceptions in some cases in which a misreading is unlikely, as in, say:
real estate agent
high school students
And though you may, now that you’re staring at these constructions, wonder worryingly about the reality of that estate agent or the sobriety of those school students, I’d urge you to stop staring and move on. (Staring at words is always a bad idea. Stare at the word “the” for more than ten seconds and reality begins to recede.)
Generally—yes, exceptions apart, there are always exceptions—one wields a hyphen or hyphens in these before-the-noun (there goes another one) adjectival cases to avoid that momentary unnecessary hesitation we’re always trying to spare our readers.
Consider the difference between, say, “a man eating shark” and “a man-eating shark,” where the hyphen is crucial in clarifying who is eating whom, and “a cat related drama,” which presupposes an articulate cat with a penchant for talking about the theater, and “a cat-related drama,” which is what you meant in the first place.
I recall, for instance, my puzzlement upon encountering this sentence:
Touch averse people who don’t want to be hugged are not rude.
What on earth, I wondered, are “averse people,” and why on earth are you telling me to touch them if they don’t want to be hugged, but wait, what—?
Then the light dawned: People who don’t like to be touched and who resist your attempts to hug them are not rude. Got it.
Now, mind you, this confusion kicked off and resolved itself in seconds. And I assure you, I’m not shamming; you may possibly have read the sentence correctly on your first attempt, but I was flummoxed. Surely, though, the confusion might have been avoided entirely had the sentence simply read:
Touch-averse people who don’t want to be hugged are not rude.
Now, then, as we navigate these migraine-inducing points of trivia, impossible-to-understand differentiations, and inconsistently applied rules, do you wonder why, though I hyphenated “migraine-inducing” and “impossible-to-understand,” I left “inconsistently applied” open?
Because compounds formed from an “-ly” adverb and an adjective or participle do not take a hyphen:
inconsistently applied rules
maddeningly irregular punctuation
beautifully arranged sentences
highly paid copy editors
Why?
Because, we’re told, the possibility of misreading is slim to nil, so a hyphen is unnecessary.
Or, if you prefer a simpler explanation:
Because.*43
53.
Modern style is to merge prefixes and main words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) seamlessly and hyphenlessly, as in:
antiwar
autocorrect
codependent
extracurricular
hyperactive
interdepartmental
intradepartmental
nonnative
outfight
preexisting
pseudointellectual
reelect*44
subpar
unpretentious
I’d suggest that you follow this streamlined style—and I can see some of you gritting your teeth over this already—because to do otherwise will make you look old-fashioned or, worse, rubelike.*45
But: If you find any given hyphenated compound incomprehensible or too hideous to be borne, it’s OK—but choose your battles, please, and make them rare—to hold on to that hyphen.*46
54.
There are some exceptions, though.
Aren’t there always?
To recreate is to enjoy recreation, but to create something anew is to re-create it. And you may reform a naughty child, but if you are taking that child literally apart and putting it back together, you are re-forming it. You may quit your job by resigning, but a contract, once signed, can certainly be re-signed.
55.
As ye prefix, so shall ye suffix. We tend not to think about whether to append a suffix with a hyphen, because we’re quite used not to: -ing (as in “encroaching”), -ism (as in “Darwinism”), -less and -ness (as in “hopelessness”), and all the rest. But if you don’t like the looks of, as above, “rubelike”—is it something to do with Russian money? some sort of insidious cube toy?—I’d simply suggest that you find another, suffixless way to say what you’re trying to say. OK, suffixwise, I think we’re done here.
56.
The age of people’s children trips up a lot of people with children.
My daughter is six years old.
My six-year-old daughter is off to summer camp.
My daughter, a six-year-old, is off to summer camp.
One too often encounters “a six-year old girl” or, though it would be correct in a discussion of infant sextuplets who have just celebrated their first birthday, “six year-olds.”
57.
You might—or might not—be surprised to learn that many copyeditorial man-hours*47 have been expended over the decades as to the correct construction of the common vulgarity—and an enchantingly common vulgarity it is—used to describe an act of fellatio. Is it open, is it hyphenated, is it closed up?
Close it up. Hyphenated vulgarities are comically dainty.
58.
What, did you think I was afraid to type the word “blowjob”?
DASHES
59.
Dashes come in two flavors: em and en. Em dashes (which most people simply refer to as dashes) are so called because they were traditionally the width of a capital M in any particular typeface (nowadays they tend to be a touch wider); en dashes are the width of a lowercase n.
This is an em dash: —
This, just a touch shorter yet still longer than a hyphen, is an en dash: –
Likely you don’t need much advice from me on how to use em dashes, because you all seem to use an awful lot of them.
They’re useful for interruption of dialogue, either midsentence from within:
“Once upon a time—yes, I know you’ve heard this story before—there lived a princess named Snow White.”
or to convey interruption from without:
“The murderer,” she intoned, “is someone in this—”
A shot rang out.
And they nicely set off a bit of text in standard narration when commas—because that bit of text is rather on the parenthetical side, like this one, but one doesn’t want to use parentheses—won’t do the trick:
He packed his bag with all the things he thought he’d need for the weekend—an array of T-shirts, two pairs of socks per day, all the clean underwear he could locate—and made his way to the airport.
According to copyediting tradition—at least copyediting tradition as it was handed down to me—one uses no more than two em dashes in a single sentence, and I think that’s good advice—except when it’s not.
En dashes are the guild secret of copyediting, and most normal people neither use them nor much know what they are nor even know how to type them.*48 I’m happy to reveal the secret.
An en dash is used to hold words together instead of your standard hyphen, which usually does the trick just fine, when one is connecting a multiword proper noun to another multiword proper noun or to pretty much anything else. What the heck does that mean? It means this:
a Meryl Streep–Robert De Niro comedy
a New York–to–Chicago flight
a World War II–era plane
a Pulitzer Prize–winning play
Basically, that which you’re connecting needs a smidgen more connecting than can be accomplished with a hyphen.
Please note in the second example above that I’ve used two en dashes rather than an en dash and a hyphen, even though “Chicago” is a single word. Why? Visual balance, that’s all. This
a New York–to-Chicago flight
simply looks—to me and now, I hope, to you, forever afterward—a bit lopsided.
I’ve also seen attempted, in an attempt to style the last example, the use of multiple hyphens, as in:
a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play
That simply doesn’t look very nice, does it.
You don’t want to make en dashes do too much heavy lifting, though. They work well visually, but they have their limits insofar as meaning is concerned. The likes of
the ex–prime minister
certainly makes sense and follows the rules, but
the former prime minister
works just as well.
And something like
an anti–air pollution committee
would do better to be set as
an anti-air-pollution committee
or perhaps to be rethought altogether.
En dashes are also used for
page references (pp. 3–21)
sporting game scores (the Yankees clobbered the Mets, 14–2)*49
court decisions (the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling by a 7–2 vote)
QUESTION MARKS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS
60.
If—and I’d restrict this bit of advice for more casual prose or the rendering of dialogue—a sentence is constructed like a question but isn’t intended to be one, you might consider concluding it with a period rather than a question mark. “That’s a good idea, don’t you think?” means something quite different from “That’s a horrible idea, isn’t it.”
61.
Go light on the exclamation points. When overused, they’re bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying. Some writers recommend that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points per book; others insist that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points in a lifetime.
62.
That said, it would be irresponsible not to properly convey with an exclamation mark the excitement of such as “Your hair is on fire!” The person with the burning head might otherwise not believe you. And the likes of “What a lovely day!” with a period rather than a bang, as some people like to call the exclamation point, might seem sarcastic. Or depressed.
63.
No one over the age of ten who is not actively engaged in the writing of a comic book should end any sentence with a double exclamation point or double question mark.
64.
We won’t discuss the use of ?! or !? because you’d never do that.*50
65.
Neither will we discuss the interrobang, because we’re all civilized adults here.
66.
Sentences beginning with “I wonder” are not questions—they’re simply pondering declarations—and do not conclude with question marks.
I wonder who’s kissing her now.
I wonder what the king is doing tonight.
I wonder, wonder who—who-oo-oo-oo—who wrote the book of love.
67.
Neither are sentences beginning with “Guess who” or “Guess what” questions. If anything, they’re imperatives.
Guess who’s coming to dinner.