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Illlustrations by Rachel Joy Price
ISBN: Print 978-1-64739-922-1 | eBook 978-1-64152-650-0
R0
For Alison, my mother, a genuinely wonderful human being. With love.
Contents
LONG LIVE PUNCTUATION!
Meet Aristophanes, patron saint of punctuation. When Aristophanes was head librarian at Alexandrias main library, writing was a mess. Wow, were those third-century Greek philosophers, speakers, and politicians poor at getting their ideas down on parchmenteven if they were great at setting up civilization.
They wrote scroll after scroll of letters written with no spaces, punctuation, or help for the reader, and Aristophanes wanted a way to help readers know how much of a pause to take. He came up with a canny method of dotting ink at the top, middle, or bottom of each line. He based the dots on the formal units of speech everyone understood at the time: comma, colon, and periods.
Yes, you do recognize them. And those dots are your first weapon in the war against punctuation snobbery, too: The original punctuation marks were genuinely about pauses or breaths. When you stick that comma in where it feels right... you would not have been far wrong if you were ancient Greek. Go ahead and share that with anyone who says your comma, colon, or period is out of place.
My love affair with punctuation started about a decade ago, so I remember all too well the gut-wrench of being out of your depth, up against someone who thinks they know best. I had just started lecturing at Salzburg University in Austria, and I had been landed with awarded the advanced writing course.
Being a native speaker, I knew intuitively where the marks went, but explaining why was a whole different story. The undergraduates were so far ahead of me in their knowledge of English grammar. To catch up, I started a painful journey of very late nights, of learning the next days lesson inside out, of exploring every question from the last lesson, and of guessing their next round of quizzing. I read every book I could get my hands on and confused myself until I understood.
As with anything you put so much time and emotion into, I fell for punctuation. It made sense to me. It wasislogical. Now when I see punctuation wobbles, they are a source of comedy rather than confusion. Recently, I saw this delight on the back of a truck: Fast dog food delivery service. Is that a spritely dog delivering food (fast-dog food-delivery service) or dog food delivered to your door at speed (a fast dog-food delivery service)?
What about the joy of a missed serial comma? For instance: Id like to thank my parents, the queen and Godthat is one well-connected individualrather than Id like to thank my parents, the queen, and God, which is far more likely.
I promise you punctuation is not a secret code; it is a way for everyone to understand each otherit is the very opposite of snobbery. Just as Aristophanes planned it.
Forget blustering punctuation snobs. The rules of punctuation are easy enough for elementary school children to understandand they do. And with this book, you will learn those rules and pick up perfect comebacks to put those punctuation pedants right back in their place.
Its a Matter of Style
So why all the punctuation pedants, who almost always have different ideas of what constitutes proper punctuation? Blame style guides.
US punctuation rules are clear, but differences in use appear depending on your writing purpose and its prescribed style. Journalists follow the Associated Press (AP) style guide tweaked to a house style, often completely different to other publications styles.
Academics writing journal papers follow Modern Language Association (MLA) or, for research, maybe Turabian . Writers working with engineering, social sciences, and business use American Psychological Association (APA); lawyers turn to The Blue Book ; andas with this bookfiction and nonfiction authors rely on the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), often with an additional, possibly contradictory, house style sheet.
So when someone comes at you with their youve missed a comma, here, or youve missed the hyphen in nonfiction, you can respond with divine calm that you are using a house style. For combating snobbery, punctuation styles give us excellent breathing space.
Belly Laugh of Irony
The CMS rule for colons is not to capitalize after a colon unless it is a proper noun or more than two sentences following the colon. But the house style for this book uses a cap after the colon if it introduces a complete sentence. So I cap after the colon. House style wins.
This book focuses on the Chicago Manual of Style , but there is a cheat sheet at the back to help you navigate the main styles differences.
Here he comes, the granddaddy of punctuation, the period. What he says goesno messing around.
