Collins Improve Your Punctuation

Collins Improve Your Punctuation Graham King ???? HarperCollins Contents Cover (#u65aaa3bf-3770-5439-b035-4644a87d0f21) Title Page (#u4853363d-ad7d-540e-8a80-095769ba5103) Introduction (#ulink_32482a1a-a7aa-5799-afbb-9ca9f466af96) Punctuation (#ulink_91d846b4-ad98-5a17-8a73-2350813809ed) Units of Space (#litres_trial_promo) Sentences and Paragraphs (#ulink_92bf4283-f731-5e06-a818-c48596cbe594) Devices for Separating and Joining (#litres_trial_promo) Scree-e-e-eechh! The Full Stop. (#ulink_a9bb0449-2bbb-56f1-9a9e-ab66086ab72d) The Common, but Contrary, Comma. (#ulink_8705195a-5aa8-5e1b-a432-7b5d69a188f0) The Serviceable Semicolon (#litres_trial_promo) Trouble with your Colon? (#litres_trial_promo) The Seductive Embrace of Parentheses [Brackets] (#litres_trial_promo) A Dash to the Rescue (#litres_trial_promo) Hassles with Hyphens (#litres_trial_promo) A Hotchpotch of Hyphens (#litres_trial_promo) Symbols of Meaning (#litres_trial_promo) Any Questions? The Question Mark (#litres_trial_promo) The Exclamation Mark! (#litres_trial_promo) Avoiding Catastrophes with Apostrophes (#litres_trial_promo) Quotation Marks (#litres_trial_promo) Punctuation Pot-pourri: ellipsis, asterisks, bullets, strokes and typographical effects (#litres_trial_promo) The Numbers Game: Punctuating Numbers and Figures (#litres_trial_promo) Put Your Punctuation to the Test! (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Writing Guides by Graham King (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PUNCTUATION. n. [punctum, Latin]. 1. The use of symbols not belonging to the alphabet to indicate intonation and meaning not otherwise conveyed in the written language. 2. The symbols used for this purpose. Introduction (#ulink_588d5149-e449-5470-889b-c26586d783e8) Punctuation makes possible the clear presentation of the written language. Or, as one British newspaper advises its writers, punctuation is ?a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling?. It is the nuts and bolts of the language. There is a strong view that punctuation is more important than spelling. Dr Temple, a former Archbishop of York, thought so. ?Now spelling is one of the decencies of life, like the proper use of knives and forks,? he wrote in 1938. But, ?if you are getting your commas, semicolons and full stops wrong, it means that you are not getting your thoughts right, and your mind is muddled.? Despite the importance of punctuation in effective communication, there seems today to be a woeful indifference to and ignorance about using even its simplest forms. Or can it be fear? If so, then punctuation?s scary image is undeserved, as you?ll soon discover in this book. Although designed as an all-inclusive, authoritative reference work it will guarantee to take the perils out of punctuation quickly, efficiently and ? yes ? entertainingly. Punctuation ? What?s the Point? Those dots, strokes and squiggles may appear physically insignificant on a page of print and evanescent in our speech, but without them all would be chaos. Not knowing how to use them properly can result in even greater chaos. If you were to say to someone: I hate habitual liars; like you, I find them detestable. that person would very likely agree. But imagine the reaction should you tinker slightly with the punctuation: I hate habitual liars like you; I find them detestable. You?re looking at a system that?s some 2,500 years old. The Greeks came up with the germ of the idea but it took until the Middle Ages for our present system to emerge and a further 500 years for it to acquire its final polish. Perhaps encouraged by a full complement of marks, writing became very elaborate. Its more skilled practitioners ? say, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens ? loved to punctuate, and their stately prose is speckled with all manner of stops and symbols. Sentences held together by a score or more commas, semi-colons, brackets, dashes and other marks are commonplace. Nowadays sentences, no doubt influenced by the brevity of newspaper style, are shorter, and the need for the complicated division of long sentences has all but disappeared. Commas are freely dropped where the meaning remains unaffected. Stops after abbreviations are disappearing in a general quest for typographic tidiness. Today the majority of the English-speaking population probably goes through life without ever using, on paper, any punctuation marks other than the comma, dash and full stop. Don?t, however, be led astray by this easy-going tolerance. While parsimony in punctuation may be adequate for the majority, it will be of little use to you if you wish to improve your communication skills. The role of punctuation in writing good English cannot be underestimated. Understanding Punctuation Is there a trick secret to understanding punctuation? No, but it does help if you know something about its past. Two or three centuries ago most punctuation took its cues from speech. This was an age when the predominant practice of reading aloud, with its breath pauses and dramatic stresses, was translated into written punctuation ? rhetorical punctuation. A hundred years on, with increased literacy, the spoken word gave way to the written. The stress now was on meaning rather than dramatic effect, and rhetorical (or oratorical) punctuation bowed to a more logical system. Today we think we have a practical blend of both: a system capable of conveying feelings, force, urgency, tension, rhythm and passion while never abandoning its duty to consistency and clarity of meaning. Here?s an example of how a sentence might have been written, say, 150 years ago, compared with the same sentence today. The first reflects the natural pauses of speech: it is meant to be heard rather than read. The second is directed primarily to the eye and the mind, rather than to the ear. Everyone in the cast knew, that Pamela would wish to be the star performer, and once having achieved that status would look down on the rest. Everyone in the cast knew that Pamela would wish to be the star performer and, once having achieved that status, would look down on the rest. With the invention and growth of printing, the need for punctuation was inevitable, and publishers have played a vital part in its development. With punctuation, a page of type became more inviting and easier to read, and self-interested publishers ensured that the system was refined and permanent. More than any other group, publishers of newspapers, magazines and books are our punctuation police, the custodians of the language. But publishers are also human and thus prone to sloppiness and error, as the many examples of punctuation bloopers and barbarisms in this book will attest. None of us should ever take punctuation for granted! Collins Makes Punctuation Easy Anyone who reads and writes needs to possess a good working knowledge of English grammar, and that includes punctuation. Any piece of writing will fall apart without the nuts and bolts of punctuation. It?s an irony that although the wonderful communicating tool known as English is the second most widely used language in the world today, it is also probably the most abused and misused. During the last few decades millions of British schoolchildren were denied any formal instruction in important aspects of grammar and punctuation. Now, as adults, many lack confidence when they come to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. Fortunately there are signs that near-illiteracy is no longer the fashion, and the urge to improve writing skills (judging from the sales of dictionaries and language books) is growing at a phenomenal rate. This book is intended for all those people for whom punctuation is a plague of spots and dots and marks. The role of punctuation in writing good English is demonstrated step by logical, practical step. Hundreds of examples help explain in seconds what hours of former teaching ? or the lack of it ? never managed to impart. And take heart! Somerset Maugham couldn?t handle commas. Jane Austen got her quotation marks in a twist. George Orwell feared semicolons so much he wrote a novel without any at all. The competition isn?t so awesome after all. Collins Good Punctuation is an easy-going refresher course that banishes forever hassles with hyphens, catastrophes with apostrophes, confusion with commas. After an hour or two with this book the perils of punctuation should exist no more. Punctuation for the Birds The following passage employs all the punctuation marks used in writing English. They are, in order of appearance: capital letter, italic and bold emphasis, asterisk, semicolon, comma, parenthesis, colon, full stop, double quotation marks, contraction apostrophe, question mark, exclamation mark, underline, dash, hyphens, possessive apostrophe, square brackets, stroke, single quotation marks, and three-dot ellipsis. The habits of the Rook* are very interesting and easily watched; hours can be wasted in early spring observing them as, cawing incessantly, they gather in their rookery to build or repair their large nests in the topmost branches, causing a rain of twigs and sticks to fall on the garden below (and not only on the garden: my brother was almost knocked out after being hit by a branch of Scots pine. ?What?s that?? he cried out, obviously dazed. ?A tree?s fallen on me!?) and which are never retrieved. Worse, of course, is to be struck by a dead rook ? the weak and ne?er-do-wells are executed and expelled from their nests ? and anyone blitzed by a half-kilo chunk of solid rook?s meat can say with some feeling [the editor concurs, having had just such an experience/calamity] that walking under a rookery is definitely ?for the birds? ? * And this is a footnote. A Victorian Schoolmistress?s 10 Golden Rules of Punctuation Sentences begin with a Capital letter, So as to make your writing better. Use a full stop to mark the end. It closes every sentence penned. The comma is for short pauses and breaks, And also for lists the writer makes. Dashes ? like these ? are for thoughts by the way. They give extra information (so do brackets we may say). These two dots are colons: they pause to compare. They also do this: list, explain, and prepare. The semicolon makes a break; followed by a clause. It does the job of words that link; it?s also a short pause. An apostrophe shows the owner of anyone?s things, And it?s also useful for shortenings. I?m so glad! He?s so mad! We?re having such a lark! To show strong feelings use an exclamation mark! A question mark follows What? When? Where? Why? and How? Do you? Can I? Shall we? Give us your answer now! ?Quotation marks? enclose what is said, Which is why they?re sometimes called ?speech marks? instead. Units of Space (#ulink_9bd37acc-77fe-5f90-bfac-ec073c8c66b2) Sentences and Paragraphs (#ulink_e4c58b8f-c901-5065-bb5b-5980555fd4a2) Space is a basic form of punctuation. It separates words, sentences, paragraphs and larger units such as chapters. Historically, in mediaeval manuscripts and early books, sentences were separated by a variety of decorative devices. But with the advent of printing this labour-intensive practice was dropped in favour of plain spaces: small spaces between words, larger spaces between sentences, and fresh lines ? sometimes indented ? for paragraphs, as in this book. Early capital letters were typically highly ornamented to draw attention to the start of a sentence. Today, although we have dropped the ornamentation, the capital still conventionally serves as a marker for the beginning of sentences and proper names and is also used for several other functions. The sentence is about the most common of all grammatical units. We speak in sentences. The most untutored letter-writers among us will use them while ignoring every other form of punctuation. So the sentence seems to be a good place to begin a discussion about punctuation. The Unique Nature of the Sentence So, what is a sentence? The Oxford English Dictionary?s famous definition was: ?Such portion of a composition or utterance as extends from one full stop to another.? More recently (1998) the Collins English Dictionary described the sentence as ?a sequence of words capable of standing alone to make an assertion, ask a question, or give a command, usually consisting of a subject and a predicate containing a finite verb.? And there are dozens more stabs by eminent grammarians at defining what a sentence is and is not, which is surprising as the unit has been around for some 1,500 years. What the grammarians seem to miss is the sentence?s quality of uniqueness. The American philologist Professor Stephen Pinker delights in pointing this out. ?Go into the Library of Congress,? he suggests, ?and pick a sentence at random from any volume, and chances are you would fail to find an exact repetition no matter how long you continued to search. Estimates of the number of sentences that an ordinary person is capable of producing are breathtaking ? Let?s assume that a person is capable of producing sentences up to twenty words long. Therefore the number of sentences that a speaker can deal with in principle is at least a hundred million trillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000).? If that statistic puts you into a spin, at least the functions of the sentence are quite straightforward: ? To make statements. ? To ask questions. ? To request action. ? To express feelings. It?s also reasonable to say that a sentence should express a single idea, and that it should be complete in thought and construction. Like this: The rare great crested newt was once called the great warty newt. The sentence can be quite elastic, and punctuation allows us to expand this useful unit: The rare great crested newt, which is native to Britain and rarely exceeds fifteen centimetres in length, was once called the great warty newt. You?ll notice how the cunning commas have enabled us to double the length of the sentence without sacrificing any of its original clarity. Sentences can also shrink, often alarmingly: ?Don?t!? That single word, providing it is given meaning by other words and thoughts surrounding it, is a sentence, or more accurately, a sentence fragment. Here it is, now in a context that provides its relevance and meaning: I went over to the door and tried to open it. ?Don?t!? I spun around, searching for the owner of the angry voice. In the darkness, a face appeared ? You can see that not only the surrounding words, but also a range of spaces and punctuation marks, help to give that single word the meaning intended. Here is another example, the opening of Charles Dickens?s novel Bleak House: London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln?s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes ? gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another?s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. The first three sentences in this passage are not grammatical sentences at all, and most grammarians would choke over several of the others, too. But it is such a vivid evocation of a miserable rainy November day in Victorian London that few would dare to challenge the novelist?s masterly manipulation of the language. Or argue too much about ?proper? sentences. At least they are punctuated correctly; they all start with a capital letter and finish with a full stop. How Long is a Sentence? A question that crops up with astonishing regularity is, ?How long should a sentence be?? The usual answer is, neither too long nor too short. A sensible approach is to regard short sentences as more easily understood than long, complicated ones, but an endless succession of staccato sentences can be irritating to the reader. It really comes down to judgment. Careful writers will ?hear? their work as they proceed; that way the sentences will form themselves into a logical, interesting, economical and, with luck, elegant flow of thought. Here?s a piece of prose that?s more a form of mental torture than sentence: A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses or if he would not be unable or virtually unable to walk if he habitually wore or used a prosthesis or an artificial aid which is suitable in his case. That is a grammatical sentence written by someone expecting it to be understood, but it defies understanding. Yet what it is trying to say is something very simple and which can be unambiguously expressed in our ideal sentence, ?complete in thought and construction?: Persons are regarded as physically disabled if they always need an artificial aid to walk. As you can see, sentences can be grammatical without making any sense. The linguist Noam Chomsky proved this by forming a chain of words that bore the least logical relationship with each other: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. The words make no sense but it is a well-formed sentence complete with verb. The Paragraph The most quoted definition of a paragraph is that of Sir Ernest Gowers, who wrote in The Complete Plain Words that it is ?a unit of thought, not of length ? homogeneous in subject matter and sequential in treatment of it.? The Times, in advising its journalists, adds: ?Rarely should a paragraph in The Times be of only one sentence, least of all a short one, unless special emphasis is needed. Long paragraphs are tedious but short ones are jerky and can be equally hard to follow. The best advice is to remember Gowers and ask, before pressing the paragraph key, ?Have I finished that thought??.? All very well, but of all the units of punctuation the paragraph is the least precise and the most resistant to rules. Sometimes they are indented, sometimes not. Quite often, the first paragraph under a heading is not indented, although all subsequent paragraphs are. Browse through a handful of books and you?ll note that paragraphs can consist of a single line or a single word; you?ll also see leviathan examples which take up a page or more. Here are some practical pointers. Think of the end of a paragraph as a sort of breathing space for both writer and listener. The writer needs to gather his thoughts afresh, and the reader needs a momentary rest from concentration. In writing, a new paragraph marks a break or change in the flow of thought, which is as good a reason as any to begin on a fresh line. Capitalisation Capital letters are an important form of punctuation in that they help to guide the eye and mind through a text. Try this: mi5 is the branch of the british intelligence organisation responsible for internal security and counter-espionage in the united kingdom. mi6 is the branch responsible for international espionage. the us has its fbi, south africa has its boss, israel its mossad and the republic of ireland its g2. spies love abbreviations. Then, in britain there?s mi1, mi8, mi9 and, ultimately, wx, the butlins of the spy world. That?s a paragraph shorn of capital letters. It?s readable, with some effort, but how much easier would the eye glide through it were the beginnings of sentences and names guide-posted with capital letters ? not to mention abbreviations! Using capitals to flag the start of sentences is clear enough but confusion surrounds the capitalising of certain nouns and names. Try this Capital Quiz: Capital Quiz Of this dozen nouns and names, half are incorrect. Which ones? the Army, Spring and Autumn, bulldog, Great Dane, union jack, Vincent Van Gogh, jacuzzi, french fries, Renaissance, Venus, new testament, down under. [Answers: the army, spring and autumn, Union Jack, Vincent van Gogh, Jacuzzi, New Testament, Down Under. The others are correct.] Some capitalisations are logical but many are not. Some are consistent throughout the language while others are arbitrary, differing from country to country and even from one publisher or newspaper to another. Here, as a guideline, are the generally accepted capitalisations for a range of fairly common nouns and names. A Guide to Capitalisation Pride and Prejudice and Punctuation When Jane Austen?s Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 our system of punctuation had developed to the stage where few further changes would be made. But one patch of inconsistency lingered: the practice of not always treating question and exclamation marks as doing the job of full stops: ?And poor Mr Darcy! dear Lizzie, only consider what he must have suffered. Such a disappointment! and with the knowledge of your ill opinion too! and having to relate such a thing to his sister! It is really too distressing, I am sure you must feel it so.? ?What say you, Mary? for you are a lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books ?? ?It is unaccountable! in every view it is unaccountable!? Today, of course, question marks and exclamation marks are almost always followed by capitals. Devices for Separating and Joining (#ulink_3503c337-edac-5903-926d-b87d706c101c) Scree-e-e-eechh! The Full Stop. (#ulink_42bc0e67-6bb4-507c-b865-20bb94430904) Now we shrink from the paragraph to a minuscule dot: the full stop, stop, full point or period. Minuscule it may be but, like atoms and germs, it packs a potent power. The full stop is the most emphatic, abrupt and unambiguous of all the punctuation marks. Leave out a vital full stop and you?re really in trouble: KING CHARLES I PRAYED HALF AN HOUR AFTER HE WAS BEHEADED. The full stop is probably the most used mark, partly because we need it so much, and partly because virtually everyone knows how to use it. Unfortunately not everyone knows how to use it wisely. ?Punctuation,? The Times advises its journalists, ?is ? not a fireworks display to show off your dashes and gaspers. Remember the first rule: the best punctuation is the full stop.? The full stop is used like a knife to cut off a sentence at the required length. The rule is that simple: where you place your stop is up to you, but as we saw in the chapter on the sentence it is generally at the point where a thought is complete. Master this principle and you can then move on to using full stops stylistically. Here?s a typical passage displaying a variety of punctuation marks; the full stop, though, is easily the most predominant: With intense frustration, Giles grabbed the man, surprising him. ?No you don?t!? he yelled hoarsely. The stranger recovered, fighting back. Fiercely. Savagely. Hard breathing. Curses. Grunts. The wincing thud of fists. An alarming stream of crimson from Giles?s left eye. Pulses racing, they glared at one another, each daring the other to make a move. A car horn in the distance. Shouts. That?s stylised prose and could be criticised for its overuse of sentence fragments rather than complete sentences. But here the heavy-handed application of the full stop is deliberate, for we can see what the writer is getting at ? the brutal punch, punch, punch of a ferocious fist fight. We can also see from that example just how important the full stop is, although there have been numerous attempts to do without it. One of the most famous examples is the Penelope chapter in James Joyce?s novel Ulysses: ?? a quarter after what an earthly hour I suppose they?re just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarm clock next door ? [until about a thousand words later] ?? and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.? You did notice the full stop at the very end, didn?t you? At least James Joyce decided to observe the rule that every sentence, however long, must end with a full stop or some other ending device. Of course that?s an extreme case, with Joyce chucking out all stops to achieve the effect of a stream of consciousness outpouring. At the other end of the scale is prose that goes full stop mad, such as this excerpt from Alain Arias-Misson?s Confessions. The style was considered highly novel in the 1970s: Fischer shot a glance at me. Listen, Fischer, I said, is there any way out of here? You are not an initiate, he said. Of course I addressed myself to him because I hoped there might be a model in his game. I watched the pieces under his eyes. Ah yes, I said, I see. How curious, I thought, as I stood up, that I hadn?t realised it until now. I didn?t know what move to make next. The next move may be death, he said. I moved my piece and walked out of the room. He was no longer outside of the game. He was of course a free agent. I knew it would be necessary to listen carefully, in this suspended atmosphere. The master player had shown me a trick or two. It was a matter of life and death. Again, the author is using punctuation for special effect, in this case to convey something of the heart-arresting tension of a an important chess game. From these examples you can understand why it is difficult to lay down iron-clad rules for punctuation. Both examples are, by literary standards, correct, compelling and readable, but in the hands of lesser writers the extremes of ?over-stopping? and ?understopping? are best avoided. More important in good writing is when and where to use the full stop. Take the following two thoughts: ? The best store for sofas is Burton & Co. ? Our sofa has served us well for twenty years. Some writers might be tempted to link the two thoughts to make a single sentence: Our sofa has served us well for twenty years, and the best store for sofas is Burton & Co. A problem? Yes, because although the two thoughts are related by a common subject ? sofas ? they really make two quite separate points, and they don?t marry at all well in a single sentence. The crudest way to deal with the problem is to express the thoughts by constructing two adjacent sentences ? separated by a full stop: Our sofa has served us well for twenty years. The best store for sofas is Burton & Co. But this solution feels uncomfortable, doesn?t it? Although it is more logical and grammatically correct, we are left to ponder over the relationship between Burton & Co?s sofa store and our serviceable 20-year old sofa. Where on earth is the connection? Was the sofa originally purchased from Burton & Co? If so, why not use this fact to link the two thoughts: Our sofa has served us well for twenty years. It was supplied by Burton & Co, the best store for sofas. Or, dispensing with the full stop: The sofa that?s served us well for twenty years was supplied by Burton & Co, the best store for sofas. Fine, but what if the sofa had been purchased elsewhere? If this were the case, the presentation of the facts requires a different construction entirely. Perhaps something like this: Although our sofa didn?t come from Burton & Co, the best store for sofas, it has served us well for twenty years. A trio of tips about full stops and using them to form sentences: ? Keep your sentences variable in length, but generally short. ? Using long sentences doesn?t necessarily make you a good writer. ? To use only full stops is as unnatural as hopping on one leg. Full Stops and Abbreviations Full stops have been used traditionally to shorten words, names and phrases. The convention was to use full stops for chopped-off words, or abbreviations: doz. Sat. Oct. Prof. Staffs. lab. Inst. Fahr. but not for shortenings consisting of the first and last letters of the word, or contractions: Mr Dr gdn mfr St yd Revd wmk Thus, by the rules, per cent. was considered to be an abbreviation because it chopped off the ?um? from per centum. And while the Rev. Golightly required a full stop, the Revd Golightly didn?t. All this, however, has gone by the board because, increasingly and remorselessly, the stops are being abandoned in favour of speed, economy and cleaner typography. You will still see stops used for both abbreviations and contractions (for not everyone knows the difference) and sometimes to avoid ambiguity. Here is a sampling of the new order: Full stops are still required for certain other functional expressions: ? For money units: ?6.99, $99.89 ? For decimals: 20.86, 33.33% ? For time (hours and minutes): 11.45am, 23.45 hrs The Common, but Contrary, Comma. (#ulink_ae20b034-05bd-5be1-a567-74256443bfd7) The comma is the most flexible, most versatile of all the punctuation marks. Because it is the least emphatic mark it is also the most subtle and complex. And contrary. Not surprisingly, many writers feel a nagging uncertainty about using commas. While the full stop brings proceedings to a screeching halt, the comma, with its mortar-like ability to build complex sentences, enlarges upon thoughts, joins them to further thoughts and afterthoughts, binds in extra information, and generally has a good time. A writer with full command of the comma can have a ball. Here?s the English humourist and columnist Alan Coren displaying an enviable skill in a passage in which the commas are like the carefully placed hoofprints of a horse lining up for a jump, and then ? a long soaring comma-less passage follows before the full stop landing! Until I was 40, I was utterly urban, uneasy in any surroundings more arborious than a sparsely tubbed patio, and knowing no more of wildlife than that a starling was probably taller than a stoat. As for the horse, I regarded it primarily as something to watch out for in French casseroles. But 40 is a critical age, a time for last-ditch stands, so I bought that last ditch in the New Forest, and the hovel that leaned over it, and enough land for the kids to run about and get tetanus in, somewhere, in short, which would allow me to escape into that sweet Arcadia where deer eat the rockery and mice eat the roof and ponies eat the hedges and a man can be snug in his nocturnal cot and hear naught but the soporific sound of death-watch beetles laughing at the inadequacy of creosote. Now that, to a comma freak, is about as good as you?ll find anywhere in the language. Note, too, that Coren even gets away with a comma (after get tetanus in, ? ) where ordinary grammatically correct mortals would have placed a semicolon. But back to earth. Perhaps the most resilient myth about commas is that they indicate natural breath pauses. There was a lot of truth in this, as we have seen, when the language was more orally inclined, but today commas have all but succumbed to grammatical logic. Every year over the British Isles, half a million meteorites enter the atmosphere. You can hear the speaker intoning this, can?t you ? with a dramatic pause before announcing the impressive statistic half a million. Try it. But when you write it down as a sentence you find that the comma is redundant: Every year over the British Isles half a million meteorites enter the atmosphere. Most writing today demands that commas be logical, but if you are a novelist, reporting a character?s speech, you would be correct to use what are called ?rhetorical commas? when the character takes a breath. Contemporary writing is far less rambling and rhetorical than it was in Dickens? day. Here?s a not untypical sentence from Martin Chuzzlewit: Then there was George Chuzzlewit, a gay bachelor cousin, who claimed to be young, but had been younger, and was inclined to corpulency, and rather overfed himself ? to the extent, indeed, that his eyes were strained in their sockets, as if with constant surprise; and he had such an obvious disposition to pimples, that the bright spots on his cravat, the rich pattern on his waistcoat, and even his glittering trinkets, seemed to have broken out on him, and not to have come into existence comfortably. Tot up the commas ? twelve in all, plus a dash and a semicolon. If you were disposed to attempt such a sentence today you would probably use only five commas, six at most. Whether it would retain the magic, though, is another matter. Try it. Too, many, commas ? The over-use of commas still survives in sentences wrought by writers, possibly Librans, who can?t make their minds up. Their sentences tend to be hedged with ifs, buts, maybes and pontifications: It is, curiously, surprising when, say, you hear your name announced in a foreign language, or even in a foreign accent. Here?s another example, from The Times a few years ago: It is, however, already plain enough that, unless, indeed, some great catastrophe should upset all their calculations ? It?s grammatical, but a real pain to the reader. In most cases such sentences can be written with half the number of commas or less. Here?s an over-spiced sentence which can be rewritten without any commas at all: He had not, previously, met the plaintiff, except when, in 1984, he had, unexpectedly, found himself in Paris. Those are bad cases of what the Fowler brothers, in The King?s English, called ?spot plague? and fortunately, perhaps through the influence of newspaper brevity and the crispness of much modern fiction, they?re a dying breed. But the injection of the single comma into a perfectly good sentence, simply because a writer feels it is lonely without one, is a growth industry: ? The trophy presented to the winner, was the one donated by the village butcher. ? The gang left him, bleeding by the roadside. ? You can never foretell, what the weather will be like. Before we get too glib about unnecessary commas, here?s a well-comma?d, heavily parenthesised sentence written by a craftsman, detective story writer Julian Symons. In this case you will find it rather difficult to remove any of the commas without causing confusion or disturbing the flow: Waugh had already perfected his technique in writing dialogue, by which fragmented, interjectory, often apparently irrelevant, but, in fact, casually meaningful conversations carry along much of the plot, avoiding the need for description. The Comma Weight Reduction Plan Piling on commas is as easy as putting on calories; in both cases the problem is getting rid of them. And if we do decide to slim, let?s not go over the top. Here?s an exercise in comma reduction, starting with a simple sentence that?s gained a little too much weight: Pedants might claim that all five sentences differ in nuances of meaning, but to the average reader they all mean the same thing. So we are left with choosing which one is fit and lean enough to express our thought clearly, economically and elegantly. Which version would you choose? (our choice would be C, but it is our personal preference and not one we would wish to impose on others.) The ability to recognise where commas are needed and where they are not may be an acquired skill but it is worth pursuing. Merely scanning a sentence will usually tell you. The writer of the following sentence was either afraid of commas or intent on speed of delivery: The land is I believe owned by the City Council. Most of us would place commas before and after the phrase I believe because it is an important qualifier; it needs to be highlighted from the main statement, The land is ? owned by the City Council which, without the qualification, may or may not be true: The land is, I believe, owned by the City Council. A more serious lapse occurs when the lack of commas leads to ambiguity. A well-known illustration of this involves the fate of a young warrior in Ancient Greece who, on the eve of departing for a war, consults the Oracle at Delphi. Thou shalt go thou shalt return never by war shalt thou perish, he was told breathlessly. Mentally placing the commas after go and return, the warrior leapt on his chariot with brimming confidence. Unfortunately he was killed in the first battle without realising that what the Oracle meant was, Thou shalt go, thou shalt return never, by war shalt thou perish. Two commas could have saved his life. One of the most common instances of the ?dropped comma? occurs when we write or utter the phrase ?No thanks? ? without separating or mentally separating the two words with a comma. What we really mean is ?No (I decline), thanks? (but thank you all the same); what we are in fact saying is ?No thanks!? ? which if you think about it is nothing less than a rude rejection! As a general rule, where dropping a comma doesn?t endanger understanding but instead helps the flow of the sentence, leave it out. The Comma Splice Another common error is the so-called comma splice ? the use of a comma in place of a linking word to unite two sentences in the mistaken belief that it will form a single sentence: The house is large, it has seven bedrooms. That is not a grammatical sentence, but there are several ways to make it one: ? The house is large; it has seven bedrooms. ? The house is large as it has seven bedrooms. ? The house is large and includes seven bedrooms. ? The house is large, with seven bedrooms. Simple? You would think so, but splicing a second sentence to another with an inadequate comma is not confined to the inexperienced writer. Here?s the novelist E M Forster in A Passage to India: Chance brought her into his mind while it was in this heated state, he did not select her, she happened to occur among the throng of soliciting images, a tiny splinter, and he impelled her by his spiritual force to that place where completeness can be found. One hesitates to correct a master, but surely a full stop is called for after heated state, and either a colon or semicolon after select her. But you really begin to wonder when you find the great stylist W Somerset Maugham scattering comma splices throughout the pages of his novel Of Human Bondage: ? often he sat and looked at the branches of a tree silhouetted against the sky, it was like a Japanese print ? ?You must congratulate me, I got my signatures yesterday ?? ?I looked in on my way out, I wanted to tell you my news ?? All three splices call for remedial action, with the commas replaced by full stops, or at the very least by semicolons. In the last two sentences linking words such as for, because or as could happily substitute for the commas. Correct Comma Placement Despite their faulty construction, at least the meaning of those offending sentences was clear. That, however, can?t be said of the following group of miscreants where commas, or the lack of them, result in ambiguity. All four examples here are slightly subtler versions of the following old chestnuts: The deer spun an arrow through its heart. The deer spun, an arrow through its heart. To be honest, cashiers don?t go home late. To be honest cashiers, don?t go home late. But to return to the four sets of alternatives. In the first, the simple addition of a comma after sick alters the meaning of the sentence dramatically. Without the comma the travellers are merely ?fed up?, but with the comma they are in a far worse state. In the case of Brenda and Ian, the first sentence could imply that Brenda and Ian did fall in love, but not for the reason that they liked their privacy. With a comma after love, however, it is clear that their budding relationship foundered because they were protective of their privacy. At the Coronation, the sentence with the two commas suggests that she may or may not have been present at the event but had heard anyhow that guests had to stand for over six hours. The sentence without the commas leads us to believe ? although it is not absolutely clear ? that she was ??? ???????? ?????. ??? ?????? ?? ?????. ????? ?? ??? ????, ??? ??? ????? ??? (https://www.litres.ru/graham-king-2/collins-improve-your-punctuation/?lfrom=688855901) ? ???. ????? ???? ??? ??? ????? ??? Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, ? ??? ????? ????, ? ????? ?????, ? ??? ?? ?? ????, ??? PayPal, WebMoney, ???.???, QIWI ????, ????? ???? ?? ??? ???? ?? ????.