Moar Expert Writing Advice: General Puncuation

[triedunture]

Time for yet another...

T'S GIANT EXPERT WRITING ADVICE FOR WRITERS
and other people who wanna write good too


This week:

Those Funny Marks

Beginning Caveat: Punctuation is a fierce and foul mistress. No one in the world, excepting a few ancient souls, can claim to have all the knowledge in the world about punctuation. There are too many schools of thought, too many variations in English between American and British, and too many evolving phrases that haven't yet been standardized for any one person to Know Everything. So these rules and general high-horseness are based on my own meager understanding with a definite slant towards American standards, most notably in the Chicago style. The Chicago Manual of Stle (15th Edition) is the giant orange tome you sometimes see poor, weasel-faced copyeditors hauling around on subways. There are others: MLA, AP, and Chicago are the three big ones in America. I have no idea what you limeys get up to, punctuation-wise, but I bet it has something to do with tweed.

For the purposes of this little lesson, I will be focusing on the more obscure marks, the ones that are almost always used improperly if they are used at all. I mean, of course, the colon, semicolon, and dashes.

Part One: The Colon

As you can see in the italicized title above, the colon most often "introduces an element or a series of elements illustrating or amplifying what has preceded the colon." Brilliant. What the Christ does that mean? It means that a colon acts as a sort of uniting gateway within a sentence or phrase. It lets the reader know that there is a logical relationship between the two things on either side of the colon.

1. This could take the form of a list:

I'm going to roger him in several positions: missionary, doggie-style, and the helicopter.


2. It could take the form as a question and answer sort of structure:

He quoted his favorite poem: something about tigers burning. Ghastly.


3. It could take the form of a series of related sentences:

Bertie's thoughts were in a whirl: What if someone walked in? Would the police be called in? How would Jeeves get his hand out of there in time?


*Notice that in the cases of example 1 and 2, the word after the colon is lowercase while example 3's is uppercase. The reason is example 3's colon introduces two or more sentences. If it had introduced an extract or dialog quote, it would also be uppercase. I know, bloody rules.*

Colons are used after transitions such as "as follows" or "the following." Those kinds of sentences are lists. Colons are the friends of lists. They let the reader know where the list begins in a sentence when the sentence is structured in a rigid format.

However, colons are NOT used in every sentence that lists things. Don't use colons after "for example" or "namely" or "including." That's because those words themselves act as visual cues that a list is about to happen. Throwing a colon in there is just overkill.

I know. Bloody rules.

However, in fiction there is more leeway with the colon than you could imagine. If you get into the rhythm of its uses, the colon can provide some sneaky literary oomph to your pieces. Because it is so often used to create a logical bridge between two thoughts, I sometimes use it to force two ideas into close context, creating a sense of innuendo, what I would call a wink-wink, nudge-nudge atmosphere:

It was House's day off: Cuddy could see Wilson's tie was wildly askew.

You see how the colon forces you to infer that the messy tie has something to do with House's day off, although it doesn't say how? If that colon were a period, that subtly would be lost, or, at the very least, contain a different undertone.

In short, colons are your friend. They aren't scary or messy. They are orderly marks, two periods stacked one atop another to create a passage for ideas to flow from one fragment to the next.


Part Two: The Semicolon

Kurt Vonnegut once called semicolons "transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college." (He followed this chapter-long tirade with a sentence that used a semicolon, much to his displeasure. He was a crazy old man; I so admire him.)

For the same reason Vonnegut hated the vacillating semicolon, I love it. Its function lies somewhere between, as you can guess from its visual appearance, a comma and a period. It says to a reader, "Erm, I don't quite want this sentence to end; but I can't very well have it flow smoothly onwards either." The comma is a breath; the period is a pause; the semicolon is a sigh.


1. You've seen what I did just then? That's not an altogether sporting use of the semicolon, though it could be argued that I was using it as part of a series. Semicolons are used in such series when a comma would only muck up the works:

House began arguing with Cuddy, saying that his leg was bothering him more than usual; that he hadn't eaten all day, excepting the banana and peanut butter sandwich he'd found in the staff kitchen; that his fellows were all idiots; and that Wilson, who was being very prissy, still wasn't speaking to him.

Do you see how the semicolons are used in place of the normal commas, which would be lost in the shuffle of the complex list? The semicolons here function as Super Commas, keeping order in a sentence gone mad.


2. Another boring yet official use of the semicolon: before adverbs, conjunctions, and expressions like "namely" or "that is."

Mr Wooster had requested the curtains remain closed; indeed, it was a lucky thing I had followed these orders.

OR

I had always dreamt of telling Jeeves how I felt; yet with the man himself staring at me expectantly, I couldn't go through with it.

OR

I endeavoured to ease Mr Wooster's distress; that is, I was inclined to recite a line or two of my favourite verse from the poet Burns.


3. Like the colon, the semicolon works here to join two thoughts together. Unlike the colon, however, the semicolon is more fluid and less jarring. Think of colons joining ideas together like a German army some army that is neatly organized and well-funded, if you can find such a thing these days, building a stable concrete bridge between one bank and the next. The semicolon, by comparison, is weaving a tenuous rope bridge above a very deep gulf.

Here are some sentences that can change dramatically when a colon is exchanged for a semicolon:

I loved him: he loved me.

COMPARED TO

I loved him; he loved me.

Do you hear the difference? The colon is so matter-of-fact. I loved him, therefore he loved me. Those of you with a background in mathematics can almost always substitute a triangle of dots, the mathematical symbol for "therefore," for every colon you see, except at the beginning of lists, of course.

In comparison, the semicolon is more vague about the relationship between the two elements of that sentence. Did I love him because he loved me or vice versa? Did I love him before or after he loved me? The semicolon leaves such a simple statement open to interpretation. Use the semicolon's power wisely; you never know what sorts of trouble you'll get into.


Part Three: The Dashes

Oh, has any mark ever been so wronged as the family of dashes? No! We use them and abuse them as one would a whore; it's all wrong and icky.

1. The Em Dash (Alt+Cntrl+ Num -)

The em is the mother of all dashes (except of course for the 2- and 3-em dash, which are used to "censor" names and curses, but we rarely use those anymore). The em dash and other dashy symbols can be found in Word under insert-->symbol-->special characters tab if the keyboard shortcut doesn't work for you. The em dash is so named because it is the length of the letter M on a standard typewriter; in typography, that length is called an em, just as an en dash below is named after the length of the letter N. If you are in a very big bind and don't have an em dash handy, most people agree that using two hyphens is about the same length. I sometimes forget to substitute ems for the double hyphens when copying and pasting stories out of G-docs, which doesn't have a symbol menu very handy. No one but myself has noticed. Or cared.

Em dashes are used for all sorts of things—usually to set things off in a dashing sort of way. Notice that a comma could just as correctly used there, but the em dash gives the phrase that follows it a sense of immediacy. Em dashes can also set off asides in a way that differs slightly from parentheses—like so—before the sentence continues onward.

*Notice that there is never spaces following the dashes. To place spaces between the dash and the words is useless and takes up valuable room. (The dash was invented by typographers to conserve space, after all.) Also, if the purpose of the dash is to provide immediacy and to mimic the long-lost art of hand-lettering prose, then spaces only dilute its power.*

2. The En Dash (Cntrl+ Num -)

The en dash is slightly shorter than the em but longer than the hyphen. Its SOLE PURPOSE is to connect numbers, and in some instances words, in a way that substitutes for the word "to" or "through." For instance:

1999–2008
Romans 6:12–22
voted 4–5
the New York–London flight

This is such a small thing, and rarely used in fiction. And I've never seen it used on the internet. After all, who's going to hunt down an en dash on their text editor when they can just throw in a hyphen like everyone else in the fucking world?

The only people you would impress by using the en dash correctly are copyeditors, grammar nerds like me, and editors.

Take note: editors. *taps side of nose*


3. The Hyphen

The hyphen is a tiny dash that most people use in place of the em and en dashes quite wrongly. The hyphen is used to create compound words, although more and more compound words are officially fusing together in American English. If you're really very worried about whether or not to use a hyphen in a compound, sod it. If your nearest handy dictionary offers both spellings, just stick to one spelling and stay with it throughout a piece.

I use hyphens probably too much. I like them because they reduce confusion when it comes to writing what I want to be a compound word or phrase. Near-death is very different from near death. The former means one almost died; the latter means one is near perhaps the scent of death or something that has died.

On a personal note: it's "e-mail" with a hyphen. Email is the French word for "fingernail," (I'm told it's actually "enamel") I believe. Gosh, that irks me, although in ten years "email" will probably be admitted to the Heritage Dictionary, damn it all to the foulest hell.


WE'VE REACHED THE END OF THIS HORRID LESSON IN PUNCTUATION.

Congratulations. You've listened to me blither on about things that no one, even major publishing houses, cares about anymore. The fact of the matter is, good copyeditors are hard to find and they're damned expensive. Manuscripts are now only lightly copyedited if at all, and fiction in particular is expected to be nearly perfect copyediting-wise by the time it hits an acquisitions editor's desk. That means that it's mostly the author's job to know these things now.

And of course, in the world of fanfic, while some fandoms get away with commas running rampant and smiley faces inserted into dialog, I believe you guys have higher standards than that. (XD)

The point is that having a few little less-than-well-known punctuation tricks up your sleeves can't hurt your fanfic; it can only help. So go! Sprinkle semicolons, wedge in colons, dash away, dash away, dash away all.

So, was this helpful? Is it time for me to shut my trap about these things? If not, is there some other writing topic you'd like to hear me blither on about next week? Speak right into the peanut, folks!