Sometimes I despair of our language, and of other languages too. The English speaking nations are not the only ones that are abandoning the beauty of language for speed and efficiency, French, Italian, Spanish and German academics complain of the same thing. High speed societies have no time for the love of language, everything is sacrificed to "efficiency." "You don't have to say it well so long as you say it fast," seems to be the way we are going.
One of the ways people are being encouraged to be more efficient in the use of the written word is the marginalisation of punctuation. A quick browse through a microsoft style checker will tell the reader that a lot of punctuation looks fussy and pretentious, commas are unnecessary and that colons and semi colons are obsolete.
This is akin to creative writing teachers telling students to eliminate from fiction anything that does not move the plot along. Thus we get novels that are reduced to mere descriptions of events. There is no atmosphere, no characterisation, the theory being that character is established through action.
Often it is the stuff that is not directly related to the main plot that makes a story. A good example is the scence in Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are discussing burgers as they drive towards an assignment to kill somebody. Its the kind of conversation that two guys working at a factory bench would have. And that tells us a lot about hit men in an amusing and unobtrusive way.
Now it is true that in business documents language should be precise and unambiguous and punctuation sparse. But the colon and semi - colon are still as essential as the full stop or period. A colon should appear in a broken sentence where it precedes a list, like so:
What is this thing called love?
What! is this thing called love?
What is this thing called, love?
"What is this thing," called Love.
So how unnecessary are commas? Clearly a misplaced or omitted comma can change the whole meaning of a sentence.
Those uses are the only ones ever likely to be needed in business. When writing fiction, dialogue or poetry though, all of which should be capable of being read aloud, punctuation marks are like stage directions.
Commas are seperators when used around an exclusive clause as in the previous sentence, in this one though the comma simply indicates a short pause that helps the rhgythm of the sentence.
A full stop or period (both are right) indicates a longer pause (period) because we have reached the end of one thing (full stop) and are moving on to the next. Like so, which leads me to the elipsis... three stops or periods together, this is only used in creative writing, usually to suggest something unfinished, as if an interruption has lkhjfkjyr... sorry about that, the cat jumped on the keyboard.
A semi - colon would be a longer pause; a stop for breath maybe, while a colon portends something significant: usually something quite menacing.
A semi - colon can also be used to indicate that a sentence is not finished; that there is more to come. And there will be more to come on punctuation for writers soon.
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 66
I must admit I have fallen into the speed trap myself...
My problem now I'm living in the states is that I still write in English-English and my editor then goes through it and changes it to American-English. But at least the grammar is pretty much the same.
Punctuate the following sentence:
"A woman without her man is nothing."
The story goes that the men in the class punctuated it this way:
"Woman, without her man, is nothing."
But the women punctuated it like this:
"Woman: without her, man is nothing."
BTW, I'm glad to see somebody speaking out in favor of punctuation. I hate reading emails and blogs in which there is no punctuation, no caps, all caps, and other forms of "style" that leave me with no clue what the author is trying to say.
Ian, thanks for this article! I do agree with E.B. -- you could have elaborated a bit more on the title subject. This is helpful to aspiring writers and I look forward to reading more of what you have to say!
I read "Tom Sawyer" and
"Hckleberry Finn" again over
the past two days. Your
message came through.
Maybe you could persuade Gather to increase the font size and add a spell check so when we master these pesky little things we'll be able to easily read our more literate posts.
Mike Firesmith, there are lots of people want to burn me at the stake Mike, but not for punctillious punctuation.
Mimi Mieux, Actually I have not read that book. More will be revealed in my follow up ost, "Eats, fires and leaves" (online as soon as I am though with this.
EB - you want more than three lines on semi colons, I want tying to a bed and lashing with nine stands of cold spaghetti !
OK, I will send you some examples.
Chris C - yeah, I am a very creative punctuator. In dialogue I often use an exclamation mark to represent the British - well mostly London - working class glottal stopped "T" i.e. "glo ! l" The northern glottal stop is a totally different experience, we just drop the T rather than swallowing it. Nothing wrong with being creative of course.
Damien - very true. I used to spend a lot of time as a manager trying to instil basic punctuation like; "you don't need a full stop after each clause."
Response "what's a clause?"
GE H - The women are right. In the men's version there is no need to make "without her man" an exclusive clause.
Wm H - Paragraphs? Plenty of paragraphs on my screen but the editors provided by many group hosting organizations are very inconsistent in stripping out formatting. Unfortunately we cannot exercise much control over what happens on the server. I actually dumped one account because it stripped out my careful formatting.
J Johannes - I will elaborate now I find people are interested. Semi colons do appear a lot in soliloquies - very useful for indicating the speaker is voicing a stream of thoughts.
And I noticed in my e-mail notifications that someone picked me up on a spelling error, seperate for separate. I have a mental block about that word for some reason. Don't know why the comment did not show up when I viewed the post, Gather prob. maybe...
I hope your wife obliges your desire for a spaghetti lashing ;)
(look, I used a semi-colon!)
Actually its my blonde friend in Dallas who introduced me to the pleasures of cold Spaghetti. We have some really weird e-mail and telephone exchanges. We are working on a sries on podcasts called Carton and Carbuncle, a couple of dumbass time travellers. Carbuncle is an English village idiot, Carton, a fast talking American who is not as smart as he thinks he is started off as Carlton but chaned his name when after a time - jaunt he rematerialised with his head in a corn-flake box and was doomed to be square headed for ever (unless he can manage to rematerialize in a goldfish bowl.
Now you know where these things come from. Nice semi colon btw.
Now "care" is too strong a word for how I feel about language. I care about fun and in creative writing, without good punctuation we lose inflection. And inflection matters a lot in humour.
I'll show you as we go on.
Contrary to common belief Germans have a fine literary tradition and a great sense of humour.
Ian
On the one hand, I loathe when communication is garbled and incomprehensible due to laziness, and I often find myself correcting people.
On the other hand, this is not only a complaint world-wide, but also an age old one that really isn't about technology or our current place in history so much as the nature of living languages. Many of our modern words, including all contractions, come from shifts in culture and a kind of "efficiency". As time goes on, usage tends to mold to what is needed. Grammar, syntax, and even words evolve.
That said, along with the growing need for efficiency, I'm certain that there's also a lack of education in the field. I'm a product of the American public shool system, personally, so I had to teach myself the nuances of using quotations, semicolons, etc.
So, like Eric above, I think that most folks' lack of education, need for brevity, and the pace at which language is evolving are edging out philology and bringing something new to bear... but what is it? How is it characterized? What do we call it?
PK
So as to avoid the risk of redundancy, how about a little "poke"? The piece on colons and semi-colons has all the proctologists and gastro-intestinologists "decalring" their "exclamations"--completely without "question." Thank you for a helpful piece! Ummmm. Strike that last comment. Just kidding.
Sadly, I have no kitten to step across the keys of my computer. Any klhgpo... mistakes would be my own.
Sound bites work the best and most people have very short attention spans.
There are so many that have no clue as to what good writing means and express anything that comes to mind no matter what.
Everyone is in search of an audience and writing is an easy way to just use words to reflect the absurdity of non sense.
Bloggers are therefore opinions and words and nothing more and
are woth what you pay for them and like I have mentioned before opinions are like ass holes- everyone has one.
Magi
Here is a short extract from Hemingway, this paragraph is chosen simply because it was readily available.
FROM: THE GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA (a travel book)
"It was a green, pleasant country with hills below the forest that grew thick on the side of the mountain, and it was cut by the valleys of several watercourses that came down out of the thick timber on the mountain. If you looked away from the forest and the mountain side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away, across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of Lake Manyara.
I see lots of punctuation.
Even in the notorious Finnegans Wake, in which Joyce abandoned not only formal punctuation but syntax and often formal words, it was not possible to do without any punctuation marks at all. These are the opening lines of the book.
"riverrun past Eve and Adam's from swerve of shore to bend
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d'amores fr'over the short sea had passen-
core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy
isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor
had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse
to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper
all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to
tauftauf thuartpeatrick not yet, though venissoon after, had a
kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in
vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a
peck of pa's malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory
end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface.
The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later
on life down through all christian minstrelsy
If you fancy reading more go to : http://www.beotel.yu/~sinkest/fwtekst1.htm
Finnegans Wake has probably had more written about it that any other novel, the general consensus is that it is unreadable. Even the title has kept academics involved in debate for years. Does Joyce mean "Finnegans' Wake" as in the Irish funeral rite, or does he mean "Finnegans: wake!" in an appeal to the Irish to rise up against British rule.
If you want to read it Joel perhaps you would let me know because I did not get past page 20.
On the other hand you might get to page 20 and start to see the point of punctuation.
Back to Hemingway though. He was a great writer and the master of all his tools. His fiction is noted for its very lean and mean style. There was little in the way of descriptive passages, everything was very direct. One would imagine it being spoken by somebody who looked rather like Humphrey Bogart and who talked without taking the cigarette out of his mouth. So Hemingway's minimalist approact to punctuation in his fiction was a very deliberate choice. Not everybody is Ernest Hemingway however, most of us just have to dream on. But Hemingway took his own life. We must ask ourselves is that a price we would pay to be that good a wrtiter?
The worst case is in advertising.
And when will people learn the proper use of 's (apostrophe s)? I know, I know. Never.
Seriously, I am not complaining about individuals, people may have many good reasons for not being kings or queens of the keyboard. My aim as I take this set of articles further is to reignite a love of language in people.
As a disabled person and a UK campaigner for disability rights I am delighted to help you participate in any way I can.
Do you know about Windows accessibility options such as "sticky keys." Message me if you want to hear more.
BTW I had a brain haemorrhage that paralyzed my left side, how did you lose the use of your hand?
best
Ian
The use of a semi colon depends entirely on the style and content of the poem and on your intention. A lot of "creative writing teachers" have the idea that poetry is just a form of therapy and so we should let the words spill out in an unstructured stream. Well that is fine for therapy but it is certainly not poetry.
Modern poetry is hardly read yet thousands of books by Keats, Sheeley, Byron, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound are still sold. Why? Simply because their work is structured, eash line and stanza is punctuated properly and the whole hangs together.
RULE 1: THERE ARE NO RULES.
But what you must ask yourself is; Am I communicating with my reader of just with myself.
Anyway check back here because I will be wrioting more on punctuation but also I will be doing some studies on poetic techniques to encourage poets to stretch themselves by experimenting with different styles.
best
Ian
(And now I'm paranoid that I'll commit some horrible typos or mistakes. I probably did in this comment and won't notice until I post. Dang it.)
Can't wait to read your posts on poetic techniques. I'm working a lot with poetic form right now. Maybe it's time for a "formal poetry" group?