Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Cutting a Dash

In 1885, Anton Chekhov wrote a Christmas short story called “The Exclamation Mark”. In this light parody of A Christmas Carol, a collegiate secretary named Perekladin has a sleepless night on Christ-mas Eve after someone at a party offends him – by casting aspersions on his ability to punctuate in an educated way. I know this doesn’t sound too promising, but stick with it, it’s Chekhov, and the general rule is that you can’t go wrong with Chekhov. At this party, the rattled Perekladin insists that, despite his lack of a university education, forty years’ practice has taught him how to use punctuation, thank you very much. But that night, after he goes to bed, he is troubled; and then he is haunted. Scrooge-like, he is visited on this momentous Christmas Eve by a succession of spectres, which teach him a lesson he will never forget.

And what are these spectres? They are all punctuation marks. Yes, this really is a story about punctuation – and first to disturb Perekladin’s sleep is a crowd of fiery, flying commas, which Perekladin banishes by repeating the rules he knows for using them. Then come full stops; colons and semicolons; question marks. Again, he keeps his head and sends them away. But then a question mark unbends itself, straightens up – and Perekladin realises he is stumped. In forty years he has had no reason to use an exclamation mark! He has no idea what it is for. The inference for the reader is clear: nothing of any emotional significance has ever happened to Perekladin. Nothing relating, in any case, to the “delight, indignation, joy, rage and other feelings” an exclamation mark is in the business of denoting.

As epiphanies go, this isn’t quite the same as seeing Tiny Tim’s ownerless crutch propped in the inglenook, but Perekladin is affected none the less.

What can poor Perekladin do? When he hails a cab on Christmas Day, he spots immediately that the driver is an exclamation mark. Things are getting out of hand. At the home of his “chief”, the doorman is another exclamation mark. It is time to take a stand – and, signing himself into the visitors’ book at his chief’s house, Perekladin suddenly sees the way. Defiantly he writes his name, “Collegiate Secretary Yefim Perekladin” and adds three exclamation marks, “!!!”

And the phantom exclamation mark disappears.

Most of us can’t remember a time before we learned to punctuate. We perhaps remember learning to read and to spell, but not the moment when we found out that adding the symbol “!” to a sentence somehow changed the tone of voice it was read in. Luckily we are taught such stuff when we are young enough not to ask awkward questions, because the way this symbol “!” turns “I can’t believe it” into “I can’t believe it!” is the sort of dizzying convention that requires to be taken absolutely on trust. Of my own exclamation-mark history (which is not one to be proud of ) all I can clearly recollect of its early days is that the standard keyboard of a manual typewriter in the 1970s – on which I did my first typing – did not offer an exclamation mark. You had to type a full stop, then back-space and type an apostrophe on top of it. Quite a deterrent to expressive punctuation, Mister Remington. But in fact, of course, all one’s resourceful back-space/shift-key efforts only added to the satisfaction of seeing the emphatic little black blighter sitting cheerfully on the page.

This chapter is about expressive, attention-seeking punctuation – punctuation that cuts a dash; punctuation that can’t help saying it with knobs on, such as the exclamation mark, the dash, the italic. Of course the effect of such marks can be over-relied on; of course they are condemned by Gertrude Stein (strange woman). Yet I can’t help thinking, in its defence, that our system of punctuation is limited enough already without us dismissing half of it as rubbish. I say we should remember the fine example of Perekladin, who found catharsis in an exclamation mark, and also of the French 19th-century novelist Victor Hugo, who – when he wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling – reportedly telegraphed his publisher with the simple inquiry “?” and received the expressive reply “!”

Everyone knows the exclamation mark – or exclamation point, as it is known in America. It comes at the end of a sentence, is unignorable and hopelessly heavy-handed, and is known in the newspaper world as a screamer, a gasper, a startler or (sorry) a dog’s cock. Here’s one! And here’s another! In humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes), and I can attest there is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.

Despite all the efforts of typewriter manufacturers, you see, the exclamation mark has refused to die out. Introduced by humanist printers in the 15th century, it was known as “the note of admiration” until the mid 17th century, and was defined – in a lavishly titled 1680 book Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, and of Notes which are used in Writing and Print; Both very necessary to be well known And the Use of each to be carefully taught – in the following rhyming way:

Ever since it came along, grammarians have warned us to be wary of the exclamation mark, mainly because, even when we try to muffle it with brackets (!), it still shouts, flashes like neon, and jumps up and down. In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly. Traditionally it is used:

1 in involuntary ejaculations: “Phew! Lord love a duck!”

2 to salute or invoke: “O mistress mine! Where are you roaming?”

3 to exclaim (or admire): “How many goodly creatures are there here!”

4 for drama: “That’s not the Northern Lights, that’s Manderley!”

5 to make a commonplace sentence more emphatic: “I could really do with some Opal Fruits!”

6 to deflect potential misunderstanding of irony: “I don’t mean it!”

Personally, I use exclamation marks for email salutations, where I feel a “Dear Jane” is over-formal. “Jane!” I write, although I am beginning to discover this practice is not universally acceptable. I suppose the rule is: only use an exclamation mark when you are absolutely sure you require such a big effect. H. W. Fowler said, “An excessive use of exclamation marks is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.” On the other hand, it sometimes seems hurtful to suppress the exclamation mark when – after all – it doesn’t mean any harm to anyone, and is so desperately keen.

The question mark, with its elegant seahorse profile, takes up at least double the space on the page of an exclamation mark, yet gets on people’s nerves considerably less. What would we do without it? Like the exclamation mark, it is a development of the full stop, a “terminator”, used only at the ends of sentences, starting out as the punctus interrogativus in the second half of the 8th century, when it resembled a lightning flash, striking from right to left. The name “question mark” (which is rather a dull one, quite frankly) was acquired in the second half of the 19th century, and has never caught on universally. Journalists dictating copy will call it a “query”, and – while we are on the subject of dictation – in this passage from P. G. Wodehouse’s Over Seventy (1957) it is delightfully called something else:

Question marks are used when the question is direct:

When the question is inside quotation marks, again it is required:

But when the question is indirect, the sentence manages without it:

Increasingly people are (ignorantly) adding question marks to sentences containing indirect questions, which is a bit depressing, but the reason is not hard to find: blame the famous upward inflection caught by all teenage viewers of Neighbours in the past twenty years. Previously, people said “you know?” and “know what I’m saying?” at the end of every sentence. Now they don’t bother with the words and just use the question marks, to save time. Everything ends up becoming a question? I’m talking about statements? It’s getting quite annoying? But at least it keeps the question mark alive so it can’t be all bad?

Deciding which way round to print the question mark wasn’t as straightforward as you might think, incidentally. In its traditional orientation, with the curve to the right, it appears to cup an ear towards the preceding prose, which seems natural enough, though perhaps only because that’s how we are used to seeing it. But people have always played around with it. In the 16th century the printer Henry Denham had the sophisticated idea of reversing the mark when indicating a rhetorical question (to differentiate it from a direct question), but it didn’t catch on. You can imagine other printers muttering uncertainly, “Rhetorical question? What’s a rhetorical question? Is this a rhetorical question?” – and not being able to answer. The Spanish Academy, however, in 1754 ratified the rather marvellous and flamboyant idea of complementing terminal question marks and exclamation marks with upside-down versions at the beginnings, thus:

And it’s not a bad system at all. Evidently Bill Gates has personally assured the Spanish Academy that he will never allow the upside-down question mark to disappear from Microsoft word-processing pro-grams, which must be reassuring for millions of Spanish-speaking people, though just a piddling afterthought as far as he’s concerned. Meanwhile, in Hebrew the question mark is exactly the same as our own, despite the fact that it ought logically to be flipped into reverse, since the words run from right to left. Remember Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady: “The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning / The Hebrews learn it back-wards, which is absolutely frightening”? So we have an interesting and perverse perceptual problem in Hebrew: with the question mark the same way round as our own, it looks back to front.

Unsurprisingly, Gertrude Stein was not a fan of the question mark. Are you beginning to suspect – as I am – that there was something wrong at home? Anyway, Stein said that of all punctuation marks the question mark was “the most completely uninteresting”:

Since Stein wrote these remarks in 1935, it’s interesting that she thought the question mark was on the way out, even then. Those of us brought up with the question-mark ethic are actually horrified when a direct question is written without a question mark – as in, for example, the film title Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Unmarked questions left dangling inthis way make me feel like an old-fashioned head-master waiting for a child to remember his manners. “And?” I keep wanting to say. “And?” “Can you spare any old records,” it still says in that charity-shop window – only now it’s a printed sign, not a handwritten one. Every time I pass it, it drives me nuts. Meanwhile, as Kingsley Amis points out in his The King’s English, many people start sentences with words such as, “May I crave the hospitality of your columns” and then get so involved in a long sentence that they forget it started as a question, so finish it with a full stop.

What a marvellous little aside, by the way: “if there is one”.

Of all the conventions of print that make no objective sense, the use of italics is the one that puzzles most. How does it work? Yet ever since italic type was invented in the 15th century, it has been customary to mix italic with roman to lift certain words out of the surrounding context and mark them as special. None of the marks in this chapter so far has any-thing to do with grammar, really. They are all to do with symbolically notating the music of the spoken language: of asking the question “?” and receiving the answer “!” Italics have developed to serve certain purposes for us that we never stop to question. When was the last time you panicked in the face of italics, “Hang on, this writing’s gone all wobbly”? Instead we all know that italics are the print equivalent of underlining, and that they are used for:

1 titles of books, newspapers, albums, films such as (unfortunately) Who Framed Roger Rabbit

2 emphasis of certain words

3 foreign words and phrases

4 examples when writing about language

We even accept the mad white-on-black convention that when a whole sentence is in italics, you use roman type to emphasise a key word inside it. Some British newspapers, notably The Guardian, have dropped the use of italics for titles, which as far as I can see makes life a lot more difficult for the reader without any compensating benefits. Like the exclamation mark, however, italics should be used sparingly for the purposes of emphasis – partly because they are a confession of stylistic failure, and partly because readers glancing at a page of type might unconsciously clock the italicised bit before starting their proper work of beginning in the top left-hand corner. Martin Amis, reviewing Iris Murdoch’s novel The Philosopher’s Pupil in The Observer in 1983, complained of a narrator, “N”, who was irritating on a variety of scores, and explains what can happen to a writer who uses italics too much:

What a rotten thing to do. But on the other hand, I feel he has saved us all the bother of reading the book now.

When Amis fils mentioned quotation marks as an annoyance in The Philosopher’s Pupil, he was not objecting to those that indicate actual quotations. Inverted commas (or speech marks, or quotes) are sometimes used by fastidious writers as a kind of linguistic rubber glove, distancing them from vulgar words or clichés they are too refined to use in the normal way. This “N” character in Iris Murdoch’s novel evidently can’t bring himself to say “keep in touch” without sealing it hygienically within inverted commas, and doubtless additionally indicating his irony with two pairs of curled fingers held up at either side of his face. In newspapers, similar inverted commas are sometimes known as “scare quotes”, as when a headline says “BRITAIN BUYS ‘WRONG’ VACCINE”, “ROBERT MAXWELL ‘DEAD’”, or “DEAD MAN ‘EATEN’ IN GRUESOME CAT HORROR”. Such inverted commas (usually single, rather than double) are understood by readers to mean that there is some authority for this story, perhaps even a quotable source, but that the newspaper itself won’t yet state it as fact. Evidently there is no legal protection provided by such weaselly inverted commas: if you assert someone is ‘LYING’, it’s pretty much the same in law as saying he is lying. And we all know the dead man was definitely eaten by those gruesome cats – otherwise no one would have raised the possibility. The interesting thing is how this practice relates to the advertising of ‘PIZZAS’ in quite large supermarket chains. To those of us accustomed to newspaper headlines, ‘PIZZAS’ in inverted commas suggests these might be pizzas, but nobody’s promising anything, and if they turn out to be cardboard with a bit of cheese on top, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

There is a huge amount of ignorance concerning the use of quotation marks. A catalogue will advertise that its pineapple ring slicer works just like ‘a compass’. Why? Why doesn’t it work just like a compass? There is a serious cognitive problem high-lighted here, I think; a real misunderstanding of what writing is. Nigel Hall, a reader in literacy education at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the way children learn to punctuate, told me about one small boy who peppered his work with quotation marks, regardless of whether it was reporting any speech. Why did he do that? “Because it’s all me talking,” the child explained, and I imagine it was hard to argue against such immaculate logic. It seems to me that the ‘PIZZAS’ people, who put signs in their windows – ‘NOW OPEN SUNDAYS’, ‘THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING’ – have the same problem as this little boy. If they are saying this thing, announcing it, then they feel that logically they have to present it in speech marks, because it’s all them talking.

Comfortable though we are with our modern usage, it has taken a long time to evolve, and will of course evolve further, so we mustn’t get complacent. Until the beginning of the 18th century, quotation marks were used in England only to call attention to sententious remarks. Then in 1714 someone had the idea of using them to denote direct speech, and by the time of the first edition of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones in 1749, inverted commas were used by printersboth to contain the speech and to indicate in a general, left-hand marginal way that there was speech going on.

Since the 18th century we have standardised the use of quotation marks – but only up to a point. Readers are obliged to get used to the idea from an early age that “Double or single?” is a question not applicable only to beds, tennis and cream. We see both double and single quotation marks every day, assimilate both, and try not to think about it. Having been trained to use double quotation marks for speech, however, with single quotations for quotations-within-quotations, I grieve to see the rule applied the other way round. There is a difference between saying someone is “out of sorts” (a direct quote) and ‘out of sorts’ (i.e., not feeling very well): when single quotes serve both functions, you lose this distinction. Also, with the poor apostrophe already confusing people so much, a sentence that begins with a single quote and contains an apostrophe after three or four words is quite confusing typographically, because you automatically assume the apostrophe is the closing quotation mark:

There is, too, a gulf between American usage and our own, with Americans always using double quotation marks and American grammarians insisting that, if a sentence ends with a phrase in inverted commas, all the terminal punctuation for the sentence must come tidily inside the speech marks, even when this doesn’t seem to make sense.

Since where and when to put other punctuation in direct speech is a real bother to some people, here are some basic rules:

When a piece of dialogue is attributed at its end, conclude it with a comma inside the inverted commas:

When the dialogue is attributed at the start, conclude with a full stop inside the inverted commas:

When the dialogue stands on its own, the full stop comes inside the inverted commas:

When only a fragment of speech is being quoted, put punctuation outside the inverted commas:

When the quotation is a question or exclamation, the terminal marks come inside the inverted commas:

But when the question is posed by the sentence rather than by the speaker, logic demands that the question mark goes outside the inverted commas:

Where the quoted speech is a full sentence requiring a full stop (or other terminal mark) of its own, and coincidentally comes at the end of the containing sentence, the mark inside the inverted commas serves for both:

The basic rule is straightforward and logical: when the punctuation relates to the quoted words it goes inside the inverted commas; when it relates to the sentence, it goes outside. Unless, of course, you are in America.

So far in this chapter we have looked at punctuation that encourages the reader to inflect words mentally in a straightforwardly emphatic way:

But, as many classically trained actors will tell you, it can be just as effective to lower your voice for emphasis as to raise it. Poets and writers know this too, which is where dashes and brackets come in. Both of these marks ostensibly muffle your volume and flatten your tone; but, used carefully, they can do more to make a point than any page and a half of italics. Here are some literary dashes:

The dash is nowadays seen as the enemy of grammar, partly because overtly disorganised thought is the mode of most email and (mobile phone) text communication, and the dash does an annoyingly good job in these contexts standing in for all other punctuation marks. “I saw Jim – he looked gr8 – have you seen him – what time is the thing 2morrow – C U there.” Why is the dash the mark à la mode? Because it is so easy to use, perhaps; and because it is hard to use wrongly; but also because it is, simply, easy to see. Full stops and commas are often quite tiny in modern typefaces, whereas the handsome horizontal dash is a lot harder to miss. However, just as the exclamation mark used to be persona non grata on old typewriter keyboards, so you may often hunt in vain for the dash nowadays: on my own Apple keyboard I have been for years discouraged from any stream-of-consciousness writing by the belief that I had to make my own quasi-dashes from illicit double-taps on the hyphen. When I discovered a week ago that I could make a true dash by employing the alt key with the hyphen, it was truly one of the red-letter days of my life. Meanwhile, the distinction between the big bold dash and its little brother the hyphen is evidently blurring these days, and requires explanation. Whereas a dash is generally concerned to connect (or separate) phrases and sentences, the tiny tricksy hyphen (used above in such phrases as “quasi-dashes”, “double-taps” and “stream-of-consciousness”) is used quite distinctly to connect (or separate) individual words.

Are dashes intrinsically unserious? Certainly in abundance they suggest baroque and hyperactive silliness, as exemplified by the breathless Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma:

Yet the dash need not be silly. The word has identical roots with the verb “to dash” (deriving from the Middle English verb dasshen, meaning “to knock, to hurl, to break”) and the point is that a single dash creates a dramatic disjunction which can be exploited for humour, for bathos, for shock. “Wait for it,” the single dash seems to whisper, with a twinkle if you’re lucky. Byron is a great master of the dramatic dash:

A comma just wouldn’t cut the mustard there, especially with the metre hurrying you along. Mean-while, Emily Dickinson’s extraordinary penchant for dashes has been said to be a mirror into her own synapses, symbolising “the analogical leaps and flashes of advanced cognition” – either that, of course, or she used a typewriter from which all the other punctuation keys had been sadistically removed.

Double dashes are another matter. These are a bracketing device, and the only issue is when to use brackets, when dashes. The differences can be quite subtle, but compare these two:

Is one version preferable to the other? Reading both aloud, it would be hard to tell them apart. But as they sit on the page, it seems to me that the brackets half-remove the intruding aside, half-suppress it; while the dashes warmly welcome it in, with open arms.

Brackets come in various shapes, types and names:

1 round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses)

2 square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call brackets]

3 brace brackets {which are shaped thus and derive from maths}

4 angle brackets < used in palaeography, linguistics and other technical specialisms >

The angle shape was the earliest to appear, but in the 16th century Erasmus gave the attractive name “lunulae” to round brackets, in reference to their moon-like profile. The word “bracket” – one of the few English punctuation words not to derive from Greek or Latin – comes from the same German root as “brace” and “breeches”, and originally referred (deep down you knew this) to the kind of bracket that holds up a bookshelf! The idea that, in writing, brackets lift up a section of a sentence, holding it a foot or two above the rest, is rather satisfying. For the reader, however, the important thing is that this lift-and-hold business doesn’t last too long, because there is a certain amount of anxiety created once a bracket has been opened that is not dissipated until it’s bloody well closed again. As Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked so beautifully, “One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.” Writers who place whole substantive passages in brackets can’t possibly appreciate the existential suffering they inflict. When a bracket opens half-way down a left-hand page and the closing bracket is, giddyingly, nowhere in sight, it’s like being in a play by Jean-Paul Sartre.

However, there are plenty of legitimate uses of brackets. First, to add information, to clarify, to explain, to illustrate:

Second, brackets are perfect for authorial asides of various kinds:

Square brackets are quite another thing. They are an editor’s way of clarifying the meaning of a direct quote without actually changing any of the words:

Obviously, the text only says “it” at this point, but the editor needs to be more specific, so inserts the information inside square brackets. It is quite all right to replace the “it”, actually:

Square brackets are most commonly used around the word sic (from the Latin sicut, meaning “just as”), to explain the status of an apparent mistake. Generally, sic means the foregoing mistake (or apparent mistake) was made by the writer/speaker I am quoting; I am but the faithful messenger; in fact I never get anything wrong myself:

Book reviewers in particular adore to use sic. It makes them feel terrific, because what it means is that they’ve spotted this apparent mistake, thank you, so there is no point writing in. However, there are distinctions within sic: it can signify two different things:

1 This isn’t a mistake, actually; it just looks like one to the casual eye.

2 Tee hee, what a dreadful error! But it would be dishonest of me to correct it.

Square brackets also (sometimes) enclose the ellipsis, when words are left out. Thus:

I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end. But at least when this thesis is complete, it may tell us whether rumours are true, and that Mrs Henry Wood’s “Dead … and never called me mother!” (in the stage version of East Lynne) was really the first time it was used. News-papers sometimes use the ellipsis interchangeably with a dash … which can be quite irritating … as its proper uses are quite specific, and very few:

1 To indicate words missing … from a quoted passage

2 To trail off in an intriguing manner …

Which is always a good way to end anything, of course – in an intriguing manner. When you con-sider the power of erotic suggestion contained in the traditional three-dot chapter ending (“He swept her into his arms. She was powerless to resist. All she knew was, she loved him …”), it’s a bit of a come-down for the ellipsis to be used as a sub-species of the dash. Perhaps the final word on the ellipsis should go to Peter Cook in this Pete and Dud sketch from BBC2’s Not Only But Also in 1966. (My memory was that the title of this show contained an ellipsis itself, being Not Only … But Also, but in modern references the ellipsis has been removed, which only goes to show you can’t rely on anything any more.) Anyway, Peter Cook’s musing on the significance of the three dots is quite as good a philosophical moment as Tom Stoppard’s critics Moon and Bird-boot in The Real Inspector Hound arguing about whether you can start a play with a pause. Pete is explaining to Dud how a bronzed pilot approaches a woman on a dusty runway in Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice – a woman whose perfectly defined “bustysubstances” have been outlined underneath her frail poplin dress by a shower of rain and then the “tremendous rushing wind” from his propellers: