Improve Your Punctuation

Your essential guide to accurate English

Graham King

• Publisher: Collins
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780007288069
• eBook ISBN:
  9780007571963
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Grammar & Punctuation

The plain guide to the clear presentation of written language: punctuation is the 'nuts and bolts' of the English language, and here is the ideal everyday companion.

Punctuation has been described as 'a courtesy designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling'. Included in this essential guide are:

- 'Ten Golden Rules of Punctuation' by a Victorian schoolmistress

- how to deal with capitalization, full stops and commas

- mastery of colons, parentheses, dashes, hyphens, questions, exclamations and apostrophes

- the ultimate punctuation test

- witty cartoons by Hunt Emerson

Symbols of Meaning

Any Questions? The Question Mark

So far we’ve dealt with units of space, separation and connection. Now we enter new punctuation territory: the rest of our marks are symbols of expression and meaning.

The question mark and exclamation mark share a common ancestry: both are developments of the full stop. The exclamation mark consists of a hanging stroke pointing emphatically to the stop below it to make the reader screech to a halt. The question mark has a squiggle atop the stop, not unlike a ‘q’ (for query?), and its purpose is to warn the reader that the preceding word or statement is interrogative, or of doubtful validity. Furthermore, they are all prone to stray into each other’s territory:

You’re going.	is not the same as	You’re going?
You’re going?	is not the same as	You’re going!

Same words, but the three different symbols enable us to express three shades of meaning:

• You’re going.	=	“James, I know you’ve got a bit of a cold, but not bad enough to stay home from school. You’re going.”
• You’re going?	=	“You’re going? So soon? But you’ve just arrived.”
• You’re going!	=	“For the last time, James, whether you like it or not – you’re going!”

Undoubtedly the question mark is a simple but useful punctuation device, although there are those who, inadvertently or deliberately, avoid it. One of the latter is the American comic novelist J P Donleavy who, somewhere between writing The Ginger Man (1955) and A Singular Man (1964) decided to eschew the question mark altogether. Here’s a typical passage, where the hero George Smith asks his secretary to look into his eyes:

‘Just tell me what colour they are.’

‘I think they’re green, Mr Smith.’

‘I mean the whites, what are they.’

‘White. Mr Smith.’

‘How white.’

‘Just white, Mr Smith.’

‘You don’t think they’re going grey.’

‘No, Mr Smith.’

‘Or brown.’

‘No.’

Such a passage is attributed by critics to “Donleavy’s idiosyncratic style” which aside from his refusal to employ question marks includes casually dropping other marks and ending sentences at odd places. To many readers, however, such mannerisms can be intensely irritating. Moreover, playing games with punctuation has its pitfalls; in Donleavy’s case his no doubt frustrated editor found that in A Singular Man at least one question mark was necessary to avoid confusion. Here’s the passage (Chapter 10):

“We thought the guy was nuts. A friend of yours? We were going to call the cops but he was gone all of a sudden. Left an envelope. On the window sill of the office. Are you from the institution.”

Direct and Indirect Questions

A sentence that asks a question directly requires a question mark, but a sentence that poses an indirect question does not:

DIRECT QUESTION	‘Are you going to the match?’
INDIRECT QUESTION	‘I asked him if he was going to the match.’

This looks fairly simple but sometimes an indirect question can be disguised. Here’s a sub-headline from The Sunday Times:

A hundred years after Freud, 50 after the development of potent psychiatric drugs, have our ideas of psychiatric care really progressed, asks Dr Anthony Clare.

Not a question mark in sight! Why? Here’s another example, from The Times:

Why should allegations that go unchallenged in America be the subject of legal action in Britain, asks Roy Greenslade.

Both sentences seem to be screaming for question marks – the first after progressed, the other after Britain. But if you study the sentences carefully you will see that both are just novel forms of indirect questions. Taking the second example, we could write it so that its indirect status is not the least in doubt:

Roy Greenslade asks why should allegations that go unchallenged in America be the subject of legal action in Britain.

Or in the form of a reported direct question:

Roy Greenslade asks, “Why should allegations that go unchallenged in America be the subject of legal action in Britain?”

Here’s another perplexing example, ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Units of Space
• Devices for Separating and Joining
• Symbols of Meaning
• Index
• Keep Reading
• About the Author
• Writing Guides by Graham King
• Copyright
• About the Publisher