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

Airs and Graces

When I was about fourteen years old, a friend at school who spent the summer holidays in Michigan set me up with an American pen-pal. This is not an episode I am proud to remember. In fact, one day I hope to be able to forget it: the ensuing correspondence, after all, ran to only three pages, and no one from the Oxford University Press has, as yet, suggested collecting it in book form with scholarly apparatus and footnotes. But for the time being I need to get it off my chest, so here it is. The trouble was, Kerry-Anne was an everyday teenager with no literary pretensions – and for some reason this made the precocious blue-stocking in me feverishly uncomfortable. When her first letter arrived (she had pluckily set the ball rolling) I was absolutely appalled. It was in huge handwriting, like an infant’s. It was on pink paper, with carefree spelling errors – and where the dots over the I’s ought to be, there were bubbles. “I am strawberry blonde,” she wrote, “with a light dusting of freckles.” In hind-sight I see it was unrealistic to expect a pen-pal from the 8th grade in Detroit to write like Samuel Johnson. But on the other hand, what earthly use to me was this vapid mousey moron parading a pigmentational handicap?

To this day I am ashamed of what I did to Kerry-Anne (who unsurprisingly never wrote back). I replied to her childish letter on grown-up deckled green paper with a fountain pen. Whether I actually donned a velvet smoking jacket for the occasion I can’t remember, but I know I deliberately dropped the word “desultory”, and I think I may even have used some French. Pretentious? Well, to adapt Gustave Flaubert’s famous identification with Emma Bovary, “Adrian Mole, âgé de treize ans et trois quarts … c’est moi.” The main reason I recall this shameful teenage epiphany, however, is that in my mission to blast little Kerry-Anne out of the water, I pulled out (literally) all the stops: I used a semicolon. “I watch television in a desultory kind of way; I find there is not much on,” I wrote. And it felt so good, you know. It felt fantastic. It was like that bit in Crocodile Dundee when our rugged hero scoffs at the switchblade of his would-be mugger, and produces a foot-long weapon of his own, “Call that a knife? THAT’s a KNIFE.”

In this chapter I want to examine punctuation as an art. Naturally, therefore, this is where the colon and semicolon waltz in together, to a big cheer from all the writers in the audience. Just look at those glamorous punctuation marks twirling in the lights from the glitter-ball: are they not beautiful? Are they not graceful? Ask professional writers about punctuation and they will not start striking the board about the misuse of the apostrophe; instead they will jabber in a rather breathless manner about the fate of the semicolon. Is it endangered? What will we do if it disappears? Have you noticed that news-papers use it less and less? Save the semicolon! It is essential to our craft! But their strength of attachment is justified. Taking the marks we have examined so far, is there any art involved in using the apostrophe? No. Using the apostrophe correctly is a mere negative proof: it tells the world you are not a thicko. The comma, while less subject to universal rules, is still a utilitarian mark, racing about with its ears back, trying to serve both the sense and the sound of the sentence – and of course wearing itself to a frazzle for a modest bowl of Chum. Using the comma well announces that you have an ear for sense and rhythm, confidence in your style and a proper respect for your reader, but it does not mark you out as a master of your craft.

But colons and semicolons – well, they are in a different league, my dear! They give such lift! Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots … you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes – that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity – well, they are the colons and semicolons. If you don’t believe me, ask Virginia Woolf:

Look at that sentence fly. Amazing. The way it stays up like that. Would anyone mind if I ate the last sandwich?

Of course, nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste. Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it – who label it, if you please, middle-class. James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P. G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvellous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming Up for Air (1939), telling his editor in 1947, “Ihad decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.” Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984), and was afterwards (more than usually) pleased with himself. The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”. Fay Weldon says she positively dislikes semicolons, “which is odd, because I don’t dislike anybody really”. Meanwhile, that energetic enemy to all punctuation Gertrude Stein (remember she said the comma was “servile”?) said that semicolons suppose themselves superior to the comma, but are mistaken:

But how much notice should we take of those pompous sillies who denounce the semicolon? I say, none at all. I say they are just show-offs. And I say it’s wonderful that when Umberto Eco was congratulated by an academic reader for using no semi-colons in The Name of the Rose (1983) he cheerfully explained (so the apocryphal story goes) that the machine he typed The Name of the Rose on simply didn’t have a semicolon, so it was slightly unwise of this earnest chap to make too much of it.

Non-writers are wary of both the colon and the semicolon, though, partly because all this rarefied debate rages above their heads. Eric Partridge, in his 1953 book You Have a Point There, says that using colons in your writing is the equivalent of playing the piano with crossed hands. But sadly, anyone lazily looking for an excuse not to master the colon and semicolon can always locate a respectable reason, because so many are advanced. Here are some of the most common:

1 They are old-fashioned

2 They are middle-class

3 They are optional

4 They are mysteriously connected to pausing

5 They are dangerously addictive (vide Virginia Woolf )

6 The difference between them is too negligible to be grasped by the brain of man

I hope we shall happily demolish all these objections in the following pages. But it is worth remarking that Fleet Street style gurus fly the flag for most of the prejudices listed above – especially as applied to the semicolon, a mark they increasingly strike out with puritanical gusto. The semicolon has currently fallen out of fashion with newspapers, the official reason being that readers of newsprint prefer their sentences short, their paragraphs bite-sized and their columns of type uncluttered by wormy squiggles. It’s more likely that the real reasons are a pathetic editorial confusion about usage and a policy of distrusting contributors even when they demonstrably know their onions. But heigh-ho. There is no point trying to turn the clock back. The great theatre critic James Agate, in his diary for 1935, recorded how a notoriously fastidious fellow journalist “once telephoned a semicolon from Moscow”. Well. You could imagine the reception he would get today.

Are the colon and semicolon old-fashioned? No, but they are old. The first printed semicolon was the work of good old Aldus Manutius just two years after Columbus sailed to the New World, and at the same date and place as the invention of double-entry book-keeping. But although I still swoon every time I look at this particular semicolon from 1494, it was not, as it turns out, the first time a human being ever balanced a dot on top of a comma. The medieval scribes had used a symbol very similar to our modern semicolon in their Latin transcripts to indicate abbreviations (thus “atque” might appear as “atq;”). The Greeks used the semicolon mark to indicate a question (and still do, those crazy guys). Meanwhile, a suspiciously similar mark (the punctus versus) was used by medieval scribes to indicate a termination in a psalm. But let’s face it, we are not really interested in those dusty old medieval monks. What really concerns us is that, while both the colon and the semicolon had been adopted into English well before 1700, confusion has surrounded their use ever since, and it is really only in the past few decades that grammarians have worked out a clear and satisfactory system for their application – tragically, at precisely the time when modern technological communication threatens to wipe out the subtleties of punctuation altogether.

For many years grammarians were a bit cagey about the difference between the colon and semi-colon. Perhaps the colon was more “literary” than the semicolon? One grammarian, writing in 1829, lamented the two marks as “primeval sources of improfitable contention”. By and large, however, it was decided that the way to satisfy the punters was to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight. Thus the comma is the lightest mark, then the semi-colon, then the colon, then the full stop. Cecil Hartley, in his Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing (1818), includes this little poem, which tellsus the simple one-two-three of punctuation values.

This system of sorting punctuation marks as if they were musical rests of ascending value has gone unquestioned for a long time, but do you know what I think? I think it’s rubbish. Complete nonsense. Who counts to two? Who counts to three? Imagine all those poor devils who have, abiding by this ridiculous rule, sat at desks for the past three centuries, tapping pencils and trying to work out whether “To err is human, tap, tap, to forgive divine” is superior to “To err is human, tap, tap, TAP, to forgive divine” – before bursting into tears because each version sounds as bad as the other. The idea of the semicolon as an imperceptible bit weightier than a comma, and the colon as a teensy bit lighter than a full stop, is a wrong-headed way of both characterising the colon and semicolon, and (especially) sorting them out. They are not like so many bags of sugar attached to the belt of a sentence to slow it down. Quite the opposite. Here is the American essayist Lewis Thomas on the semicolon:

Expectation is what these stops are about; expectation and elastic energy. Like internal springs, they propel you forward in a sentence towards more information, and the essential difference between them is that while the semicolon lightly propels you in any direction related to the foregoing (“Whee! Surprise me!”), the colon nudges you along lines already subtly laid down. How can such useful marks be optional, for heaven’s sake? As for the other thing, if they are middle-class, I’m a serviette. Of the objections to the colon and semicolon listed above, there is only one I am prepared to concede: that semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends. Their agents gently remind them, “George Orwell managed without, you know. And look what happened to Marcel Proust: carry on like this and you’re only one step away from a cork-lined room!” But the writers rock back and forth on their office chairs, softly tapping the semicolon key and emitting low whimpers. I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation – but for many it may be too late. In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: “Ihave always been addicted to something or other, usually something there’s no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.”

So how should you use the colon, to begin with? H. W. Fowler said that the colon “delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words”, which is not a bad image to start with. But the holy text of the colon and semicolon is the letter written by George Bernard Shaw to T. E. Lawrence in 1924, ticking him off for his over-use of colons in the manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. This superb missive starts with the peremptory, “My dear Luruns [sic], Confound you and your book: you are no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo” – and then gets even more offensive and hilarious as it goes on. Shaw explains that, having worked out his own system for colons and semicolons, he has checked it against the Bible, and seen that the Bible almost got it right. With such authority behind him, he is offended by Lawrence’s cavalier attitude. “I save up the colon jealously for certain effects that no other stop produces,” he explains. “As you have no rules, and sometimes throw colons about with an unhinged mind, here are some rules for you.”

Shaw is quite famous for his idiosyncratic punctuation. His semicolons, in particular, were his way of making his texts firmly actor-proof – in fact, when Ralph Richardson tried to insert a few dramatic puffs and pants in his opening lines as Bluntschli in a 1931 production of Arms and the Man (1894), Shaw stopped him at once and told him to forget the naturalism and observe the punctuation instead. “This is all very well, Richardson,” Shaw said (according to Richard-son’s account), “and it might do for Chekhov, but it doesn’t do for me. Your gasps are upsetting my stops and my semicolons, and you’ve got to stick to them.” Richardson said Shaw spoke the truth about this: miss any of Shaw’s stops and “the tune won’t come off”. Look at any Shaw text and you will find both colons and semicolons in over-abundance, with deliberate spacing to draw attention to them, too, as if they are genuine musical notation.

To adopt George Bernard Shaw’s use of the semi-colon today would obviously be an act of insanity. But in the letter to T. E. Lawrence he is sound on the colon. When two statements are “placed baldly in dramatic apposition”, he said, use a colon. Thus, “Luruns could not speak: he was drunk.” Shaw explains to Lawrence that when the second statement reaffirms, explains or illustrates the first, you use a colon; also when you desire an abrupt “pull-up”: “Luruns was congenitally literary: that is, a liar.”

So the particular strengths of the colon are beginning to become clear. A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician’s assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.

In each of the following examples, incidentally, can’t you hear a delighted, satisfied “Yes!” where the colon comes?

But the “annunciatory” colon is only one variety. As well as the “Yes!” type colon, there is the “Ah” type, when the colon reminds us there is probably more to the initial statement than has met the eye:

A classic use of the colon is as a kind fulcrum between two antithetical or oppositional statements:

And as Shaw put it so well, the colon can simply pull up the reader for a nice surprise:

So colons introduce the part of a sentence that exemplifies, restates, elaborates, undermines, explains or balances the preceding part. They also have several formal introductory roles. They start lists (especially lists using semicolons):

They set off book and film sub-titles from the main titles:

Conventionally, they separate dramatic characters from dialogue:

They also start off long quotations and (of course) introduce examples in books on punctuation. What a useful chap the colon is, after all. Forget about counting to three, that’s all I ask.

So when do you use a semicolon? As we learned in the comma chapter, the main place for putting a semicolon if you are not John Updike is between two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as “and” or “but”, and where a comma would be ungrammatical:

What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist? In each of the examples above, a dash could certainly be substituted for the semicolon without much damage to the sentence. The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive; it enhances conversational tone; and, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is capable of quite subtle effects. The main reason people use it, however, is that they know you can’t use it wrongly – which, for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue. But it is worth learning the different effects created by the semicolon and the dash. Whereas the semicolon suggests a connection between the two halves of each of these sentences, the dash ought to be preserved for occasions when the connection is a lot less direct, when it can act as a bridge between bits of fractured sense:

So it is true that we must keep an eye on the dash – and also the ellipsis (…), which is turning up increasingly in emails as shorthand for “more to come, actually … it might be related to what I’ve just written … but the main thing is I haven’t finished … let’s just wait and see … I could go on like this for hours …” However, so long as there remain sentences on this earth that begin with capital letters and end with full stops, there will be a place for the semicolon. True, its use is never obligatory, because a full stop ought always to be an alternative. But that only makes it the more wonderful.

The semicolon has been rightly called “a compliment from the writer to the reader”. And a mighty compliment it is, too. The sub-text of a semicolon is, “Now this is a hint. The elements of this sentence, although grammatically distinct, are actually elements of a single notion. I can make it plainer for you – but hey! You’re a reader! I don’t need to draw you a map!” By the same token, however, an over-reliance on semicolons – to give an air of authorial intention to half-formed ideas thrown together on the page – is rather more of a compliment than some of us care to receive. The American writer Paul Robinson, in his essay “The Philosophy of Punctuation” (2002), says that “pretentious and over-active” semicolons have reached epidemic pro-portions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought. “They place two clauses in some kind of relation to one another but relieve the writer of saying exactly what that relation is.” Those are my italics, by the way – but it does sound as if Robinson is a bit worked up. “The semi-colon has become so hateful to me,” he says in all seriousness, “that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.”

There are times, however, when the semicolon is indispensable in another capacity: when it performs the duties of a kind of Special Policeman in the event of comma fights. If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation. One minute the semicolon is gracefully joining sentences together in a flattering manner (and sullying Mr Robinson), and the next it is calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention.

There is no option for an upstanding semicolon in such circumstances other than to step in, blow a whistle and restore order.

That’s much clearer. And we have you to thank, Special Policeman Semicolon. There are two dangers, however, associated with this quell-the-rampant-comma use. One is that, having embarked on a series of clarifying semicolons, the writer loses interest, or forgets, and lapses into a comma (ho ho). The other danger is that weak-charactered writers will be encouraged to ignore the rule that only full sentences should be joined by the semi-colon. Sometimes – and I’ve never admitted this to anyone before – I adopt a kind of stream-of-consciousness sentence structure; somewhat like Virginia Woolf; without full sentences; but it feels OK to do this; rather worrying.

Let us come swiftly to the last proper use of the semicolon. As we discovered in the comma chapter, it is wrong to write, “He woke up in his own bed, however, he felt fine.” Linking words such as “however”, “nevertheless”, “also”, “consequently” and “hence” require a semicolon – and, I have to say, this seems pretty self-evident to me. Much as I decry the old count-to-two system, there is an obvious take-a-breath thing going on here. When you read the sentence, “He woke up in his own bed, and he felt fine”, you don’t draw breath before the “and”. You rattle on. Whereas when you read, “He woke up in his own bed; nevertheless, he was OK”, an inhalation is surely automatic.

It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, “I should have used fewer semicolons” – and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their death-bed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.

What you have to remember about our punctuation system is that it is very limited. Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected) by copy-editors legislating according to a “house style”. You write the words “apple tree” and discover that house style is “apple-tree”. This hurts. The alteration seems simply perverse. And no one is immune. When Salman Rushdie’s story “Free Radio” (in his book East, West [1994]) was first published by Atlantic Monthly, I have heard that the magazine repunctuated its deliberately “logorrhoeic” narration without consulting him, presumably on the assumption that punctuation was something Rushdie was happy to leave to others, like the hoovering. Nicholson Baker, in an essay on the history of punctuation in his book The Size of Thoughts (1996), relates an emotional battle with his copy-editor over whether “pantyhose” (as written) should be altered to “panty hose”. Baker, incidentally, advocates the return of compound punctuation, such as commas with dashes (, –), semicolons with dashes (; –) and colons with dashes (: –); and in his book Room Temperature (1990), muses so poetically on the shape of the comma (“it recalled the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiralling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas … ”) that – well, you’ve never heard anything like it.

See how the sense changes with the punctuation in this example:

These two statements, as they stand, could be quite unrelated. They merely tell you two things have happened, in the past tense.

We can infer from the semicolon that these events occurred at the same time, although it is possible that Tom locked himself in the shed because he couldn’t bear to watch the match and therefore still doesn’t know the outcome. With the semicolon in place, Tom locking himself in the shed and England losing to Argentina sound like two things that really got on the nerves of someone else. “It was a terrible day, Mum: Tom locked himself in the shed; England lost to Argentina; the rabbit electrocuted itself by biting into the power cable of the washing machine.”

All is now clear. Tom locked himself in the shed because England lost to Argentina. And who can blame him, that’s what I say.

It is sad to think people are no longer learning how to use the colon and semicolon, not least because, in this supreme QWERTY keyboard era, the little finger of the human right hand, deprived of its traditional function, may eventually dwindle and drop off from disuse. But the main reason is that, as Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, “The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.” Perspicuity and beauty of composition are not to be sneezed at in this rotten world. If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without.