Periodically someone will post on Facebook their opinion of a certain punctuation mark. Comments in response unfurl like a long serpent below the post. Neutrality tends not to exist in those comments. In this way I’ve learned that writers, in particular, embrace a love-hate relationship with punctuation.
In that spirit, I’d like to offer written ponderings on various punctuation marks from famous authors. To read their passionate rants–in either direction–bemuses me. I believe only writers and grammar geeks could become so heated over these little dots and squiggles that litter our pages.
While I’m bemused, I’m also, uh, opinionated. Give me an Oxford comma! And you should employ it as well. Save me from those who want to make the semicolon nonexistent…But I am getting carried away.
Read on. I know you’ll cheer some and boo others, but here are the quotes.
Punctuation mark #1: The semicolon
Hates it
Why do I avoid, as much as possible, using the semicolon? Let me be plain: the semicolon is ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly. I pinch them out of my prose.
Loves it
There are so many things to fear in life, but punctuation is not one of them. That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside.
In compiling the sentence, efficacy—or, more precisely, precision—is important; capacity is important; and clarity is important. This kind of writer, at least, doesn’t think in little stoppered declarative sentences. It isn’t like that. Not really ever. Perhaps for some people. But not for us. For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life’s experience in some semblance of its complexity—for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.
Punctuation mark #2: The exclamation mark
Hates it
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
Loves it
I feel sorry for the exclamation mark. It used to keep such high company, mark such weighty matters of terror and villainy. “Oh damn’d Iago! O inhumane Dogge!” cries Roderigo when stabbed. “Drowned! O where?” keens Laertes of his sister Ophelia. “How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!” announces the second book of Samuel. It was a punctuational effect kept on a high shelf, and used sparingly by good writers, who knew that the noise it made would carry like a gunshot.
In ‘We’, Zamiatin constantly breaks off a thought in mid-sentence with a dash. He’s trying to imitate the habits of actual thought, assuming, quite correctly, that we don’t think in whole sentences. We think emotionally. He also used a lot of exclamation points, a habit I picked up and which I still have. Someone counted them in ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’—some enormous number of exclamation points, up in the thousands. I think it’s quite justified, though I’ve been ridiculed for it. Dwight Macdonald once wrote that reading me, with all these exclamation points, was like reading Queen Victoria’s diaries. He was so eminent at the time, I felt crushed. But then out of curiosity I looked up Queen Victoria’s diaries. They’re childhood diaries. They’re full of exclamation points. They are so much more readable than the official prose she inflicted on prime ministers and the English people in the years thereafter. Her diaries aren’t bad at all.
Advises moderation, unless you’re Tom Wolfe:
Elmore Leonard
Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
The em dash
Loves it
When a moment of true horror arises in a novel, there’s no better punctuation than a —. [For example:] ‘She stopped and gasped—and opened her mouth in a scream of horror.’ ‘He stumbled, fell—and toppled into the open grave.
Hates it
No writers. But many editors.
The comma
Hates it
As I say commas are servile and they have no life of their own, and their use is not a use, it is a way of replacing one’s own interest and I do decidedly like to like my own interest in what I am doing. A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years and I still do feel that way about it only now I do not pay as much attention to them, the use of them was positively degrading.
Loves it
For all I know, the Age of the Comma is over. But it was a beautiful time to be alive and to be fingering words. Sentences had precision. These days, you see a theater critic in a prominent magazine describing the Broadway show Sweet Charity as “Neil Simon’s sanitized musical version of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria.” Without a comma separating “sanitized” from “musical,” the phrasing implies, unhelpfully, that there are at least two stage musical adaptations of the Fellini picture, that the versions differ in their degree of sanitization, and that the sanitized version is the one under review.
The hyphen
Loves it
The hyphen…is the sweetest of punctuation marks, because it unites words into couples (and sometimes threesomes and foursomes). It’s an embracer. It does most of its most important business in front of nouns, and its business is to make things clearer.
The period
Tolerates it, if he must
I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.
Lest we all become too vehement about our punctuation beliefs, perhaps this quote from Henry James will calm the waters: “Dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce.”
Should you desire to read more of these quotes, check out the article here on which I based this blog.
Now, it’s your turn to tell us about the punctuation you loathe–or love. Write on!
What Are My Next Steps?
Punch-u-ation is a thing
that’s always my unfoxing
as it dances all around the ring
of literary boxing.
A colon’s got an uppercut
with power, a cruel blow
that sends the writer reeling but
now comes its mate from down below!
And then the point of exclamation
that should be pushed aside.
In its jabbing protestation
it will not be denied,
and then grinning steps away
that ellipsis has its knockout say…
Well said, Andrew.
Hilarious!
Yes, I used an exclamation. You are welcome to imagine me shouting.
I do not enjoy semicolons, although I do enjoy the occasional colon.
However, I love the oxford comma and ellipses.
High five on the Oxford comma and ellipses.
I enjoy all forms of grammar and am one who believes that all things are acceptable, but they are simply not to be overused. And that is truly the complicated part. Balance. When I first started learning to write, people would say not to use adverbs. But all published novels contained adverbs, just not an overabundance of them. I’ve also noticed that some are moving away from the “comma, conjunction.” I realize the omission saves space, but I like the comma in compound sentences.
Oh, spare me! I didn’t know about the move away from a comma in a compound sentence. Those little marks have meaning, people! They make reading easier and the writing clearer. Okay, now I’m going to resist adding any more exclamation marks…
Great and very clear article. THANKS!!