Not strictly punctuation, but…
Is there a correct way to present dates?
We see them printed in a surprising number of different ways. Here is a recent selection, all taken from Australian newspapers. Notice not only the words and figures, but also the presence or absence of commas, and the use of capitals.
August 6, 2010
6 August 2010
FRIDAY AUGUST 6 2010
FRIDAY, AUGUST 6, 2010
friday august 6
Friday, August 6, 2010
Friday August 06, 2010
All of these use the full forms of day and month. Then there are the ones that abbreviate the names of the days and months, so we can add those to the list. And there is the form we see printed on our emails: Friday, 6 August 2010, and the one that appears on the email screen: 06/08/2010.
We also see:
6.8.10
6/8/10
6-8-10
06.08.10
This set of options covers most of the Australian scene, so it should give us plenty of scope. If we go to Europe or America we find differences in the order of the items in the date. We may find:
day > month > year
year > month > day
month > day > year
and sometimes these forms come into Australia too.
None of the forms quoted here, incidentally, is the pattern that our grandparents, or even perhaps our parents, were taught at school. In my primary school that pattern was Friday 6th August, 2010, and the thmay or may not have been superscript, as the computer now seems to prefer.
The best advice seems to be simply to choose one pattern and make it your habit. One day, perhaps, there might again be a way of writing dates that most people in most places agree on. For the time being, take your pick. But stick to it, at least within the one piece of writing.
How do I emphasise a word,
or maybe several?
Are you writing an advertisement? Or a notice for a notice board? Please, please don't use quotation marks (inverted commas) for the bits you want to emphasise! Use a bigger typeface, or a different one, or use colour, anything but inverted commas. Please. See page 65.
Are you writing by hand? Then underlining is the easiest, and is always understood. The only other common use for underlining in handwriting is probably the occasional heading, for instance in an essay.
In typed and printed material you can choose between italics and bold. You might even use colour. Since there are some other contexts in which it is conventional to use italics, it may be best to decide on bold for emphasis, and make that your rule. For example:
It wasn't you I was thinking of, it was him.
We had to do it. We had no choice.
We use italics in the middle of ‘normal’ text when we want to mention the titles of books, poetry, plays and films.
Won't my spellchecker tell me when
I've made a punctuation mistake?
Your computer puts a wiggly line under something you've typed, green for language, red for spelling. What's wrong? Spelling sometimes involves apostrophes, which is why the matter is mentioned here. Is the computer telling you you're wrong? Or is it just asking you to check? Is it saying, for instance, ‘Do you really want an apostrophe here?' Is it suggesting that you would be better off choosing a different word?
Don't automatically think you've made a mistake. The computer is not always correct. Sometimes it will suggest something that makes you doubt what you have written, even when you haven't made any mistake. On the other hand, sometimes it will fail to query something that really is wrong.
One day I deliberately typed: That's wonderful new's!
The computer was happy with That's (because it is correct) but of course new's got a wavy line under it, so I consulted the spellchecker. It gave me five suggestions, and none of them fitted. It is difficult to imagine a context in which any of them would be correct. It should have told me simply to omit the apostrophe, and all would have been well. Here are the spellchecker's suggestions: news's newt's mew's now's net's.
Here are some more.
I typed: We need two new dictionarys. The spellchecker suggested dictionaries (correct), dictionary's (could perhaps very occasionally be correct), dictionary (the word is spelt correctly but is not the right word for this context)
I typed: The warning appear's regularly. The spellchecker suggested appeal's, paper's, appears (correct).
Here are three short items, all containing errors, which were not questioned at all:
He say's he won't go.
He says he wont go.
The babies crying.
They are all wrong, but the spellchecker accepted them. I typed the second one again, and this time it was queried.
In the first one say's should not have been accepted in any context. The third one was accepted, because babies is a word, but not the correct one for this sentence.
Note that the spellchecker doesn't know the difference between words that sound the same but are spelt differently, such as for, four and fore; in and inn; wait and weight. Also most, if not all, spellchecker programs use American spelling and American punctuation rules. You can usually change the settings to Australian spelling.
What are the correct short forms
for words like gram, litre, metre?
This list contains only those words that are commonly wrongly abbreviated. The internationally accepted forms are as follows:
| gram | g |
| kilogram | kg |
| metre | m |
| kilometre | km |
| centimetre | cm |
| litre | L (this one is a capital because the lower case is too easily mistaken for a capital I) |
You don't need to put a full stop after any of these, and you don't need to add s for plural. So you get:
| five grams | 5g |
| a hundred kilometres | 100km |
| twelve litres | 12L |