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Punctuation
… that learned men are well known to disagree on this matter of punctuation is in itself a proof, that the knowledge of it, in theory and practice, is of some importance. I myself have learned by experience, that, if ideas that are difficult to understand are properly separated, they become clearer; and that, on the other hand, through defective punctuation, many passages are confused and distorted to such a degree, that sometimes they can with difficulty be understood, or even cannot be understood at all.
ALDUS MANUTIUS, Interpungendi Ratio, 1566
(trans. T. F. and M. F. A. Husband, 1905)
This is a large subject. Whole books have been written about it, and it is still true, as it apparently was some five hundred years ago, that no two authorities completely agree. Taste and common sense are more important than any rules. You put in punctuation marks or ‘stops’ to help your reader to understand you, not to please some grammarian; but you should try to write so that your reader will understood you with a minimum of help of that sort. The Fowlers, in The King’s English, say:
it is a sound principle that as few stops should be used as will do the work … Every one should make up his mind not to depend on his stops. They are to be regarded as devices, not for saving him the trouble of putting his words into the order that naturally gives the required meaning, but for saving his reader the moment or two that would sometimes, without them, be necessarily spent on reading the sentence twice over, once to catch the general arrangement, and again for the details. It may almost be said that what reads wrongly if the stops are removed is radically bad; stops are not to alter meaning, but merely to show it up. Those who are learning to write should make a practice of putting down all they want to say without stops first. What then, on reading over, naturally arranges itself contrary to the intention should be not punctuated, but altered; and the stops should be as few as possible, consistently with the recognized rules.
The symbols we shall have to consider in this chapter are the apostrophe, colon, comma, dash, full stop, hyphen, inverted commas, question mark, semicolon. It will also be a suitable place to say something about capital letters, paragraphs, parentheses and sentences.
APOSTROPHE
The only uses of the apostrophe that call for notice are (1) its use to denote the possessive of names ending in s, and of pronouns; (2) its use before a final s to show that the s is forming the plural of a word or symbol not ordinarily admitting of a plural; and (3) its use with a defining plural.
(1) There is no universally accepted code that governs how one forms the possessive case of names ending in s, but the most desirable practice (especially with monosyllables) seems to be not just to put an apostrophe at the end of the word, as one does with an ordinary plural (strangers’ gallery), but to add a second s—Mr Jones’s room, St James’s Street, not Mr Jones’ room, St James’ Street.
As to pronouns, all these except the pronoun one dispense with an apostrophe in their possessive cases—hers, yours, theirs, ours and its, but one’s not ones (and someone’s, anybody’s, everyone’s, nobody’s etc.). It’s is not the possessive of it but a contraction of ‘it is’: the apostrophe is performing its duty of showing that a letter has been omitted.
(2) Whether an apostrophe should be used to denote the plural of a word or symbol that does not ordinarily make a plural depends on whether the plural is readily recognisable as such. Unless readers are really likely to need help, it should not be thrust upon them. This practice is clearly justified with single letters: ‘there are two o’s in woolly’; ‘mind your p’s and q’s’. Otherwise it is rarely called for. It should not be used with contractions (e.g. MPs), or merely because what is put into the plural is not a noun. Editors of Shakespeare do without an apostrophe in the line from Richard III, ‘Talk’st thou to me of “ifs” ’. And Rudyard Kipling did not think it necessary when he wrote, in the Just So Stories:
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!
(3) Whether one should use an apostrophe in such expressions as ‘thirty years imprisonment’ is a disputed and not very important point. The answer seems to be that if thirty years is regarded as a descriptive genitive or ‘possessive’, as busman’s is in busman’s holiday, we must write thirty years’ imprisonment. But if ‘thirty years’ is taken to be an adjectival phrase (equivalent here to ‘three-decades-long’), there must be no apostrophe but the words must be hyphenated: thirty-years imprisonment.* The singular form (‘a year’s imprisonment’) can only be a descriptive genitive, but in such phrases as ‘games master’ and ‘customs examination’, the words games and customs are clearly adjectival, and need no apostrophe.
CAPITALS
Several correspondents have asked me to write about the use of capital letters. The difficulty is to know what to say. No one needs telling that capitals are used for the first letter in every sentence, for proper names and the names of the months and days, and for the titles of books and newspapers. The only difficulty is with words that are sometimes written with capitals and sometimes not. Here there can be no general rule; we are free to do what we think most fitting. But two pieces of advice may perhaps be given:
(1) Use a capital for a particular and a small letter for the general. Thus:
It is a street leading out of Oxford Street.
I have said something about this in Chapter I; I shall have more to say in later chapters.
In this case the Judge went beyond a judge’s proper functions.
Many parliaments have been modelled on our Parliament.
(2) Whatever practice you adopt, be consistent throughout any document you are writing.
Colon
About the use of the colon there is even less agreement among the authorities than about the use of other stops. All agree that its systematic use as one of a series of different pause-values has almost died out with the decay of the formal ‘period’: the single sentence that contains a number of well-balanced clauses. One person will hold that the colon is still useful as something less than a full stop and more than a semicolon; another will deny it. We need not enter into this. It will be enough to note that the following uses are generally regarded as legitimate:
(1) To mark more sharply than a semicolon would the antithesis between two sentences:
In peace time the Civil Service is a target of frequent criticism: in war time the criticism is very greatly increased.
In some cases the executive carries out most of the functions: in others the delegation is much less extensive.
(2) To precede an explanation or particularisation or to produce a list or series: in the words of Fowler, to deliver ‘the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words’:
The design of the school was an important part of the scheme: Post Office counters with all the necessary stores were available and maps and framed specimens of the various documents in use were exhibited on the walls of light and cheery classrooms.
News reaches a national paper from two sources: the news agencies and its own correspondents.
For the second purpose the dash is the colon’s weaker relative.
COMMA
The use of commas cannot be learnt by rule. Not only does conventional practice vary from one period to another, but good writers of the same period differ among themselves. Moreover, stops have two kinds of duty. One is to show the construction of sentences—the ‘grammatical’ duty. The other is to introduce nuances into the meaning—the ‘rhetorical’ duty. ‘I went to his house and I found him there’ is a colourless statement. ‘I went to his house, and I found him there’ hints that it was not quite a matter of course that he should have been found there. ‘I went to his house. And I found him there’ indicates that to find him there was surprising. Similarly you can give a different nuance to what you write by encasing adverbs or adverbial phrases in commas. ‘He was, apparently, willing to support you’ throws a shade of doubt on his bona fides that i
s not present in ‘He was apparently willing to support you’.
The correct use of the comma—if there is such a thing as ‘correct’ use—can only be acquired by common sense, observation and taste. Present practice is markedly different from that of the past in using commas much less freely. The sixteenth-century passage that heads this chapter, translated to keep its original punctuation intact, is peppered with them with a liberality not approved by modern practice.
I shall attempt no more than to point out some traps that commas set for the unwary. First I shall deal with some uses of the comma that are generally regarded as incorrect, and then I shall consider various uses which, though they may not be incorrect, need special care in the handing, or are questionable.
A. Incorrect uses of commas
(1) The use of a comma between two independent sentences not linked by a conjunction. The usual practice is to use a heavier stop in this position:
The Department cannot guarantee that a license will be issued, you should therefore not arrange for any shipment.
You may not be aware that a Youth Employment Service is operating throughout the country, in some areas it is under the control of the Ministry of Labour and National Service and in others of the Education Authorities.
I regret the delay in replying to your letter but Mr X who was dealing with it is on leave, however, I have gone into the matter …
On the principle that in workaday writing of this kind, sentences should be short and should have unity of thought, it would be better to put a full stop after issued in the first quotation, country in the second and leave in the third. (See also the entry below on the semicolon, pp. 264–5.)
(2) The use of one comma instead of either a pair or none. This very common blunder is more easily illustrated than explained. It is almost like using one only of a pair of brackets. Words that are parenthetical may be able to do without any commas, but if there is a comma at one end of them there must be one at the other end too:
Against all this must be set considerations which, in our submission are overwhelming. (Omit the comma.)
The first is the acute shortage that so frequently exists, of suitable premises where people can come together. (Omit the comma.)
We should be glad if you would inform us for our record purposes, of any agency agreement finally reached. (Either omit the comma or insert one after us.)
It will be noted that for the development areas, Treasury-financed projects are to be grouped together. (Either omit the comma or insert one after that.)
The principal purpose is to provide for the division between the minister and the governing body concerned, of premises and property held partly for hospital purposes and partly for other purposes. (Omit the comma.)
(3) The use of commas with ‘defining’ relative clauses. Relative clauses fall into two main classes. Different authorities give them different labels, but ‘defining’ and ‘commenting’ are the most convenient and descriptive. If you say ‘the man who was here this morning told me everything’, the relative clause who was here this morning is a defining one: it completes the subject the man, which conveys no definite meaning without it. But if you say ‘Jones, who was here this morning, told me everything’, the relative clause is commenting: the subject Jones is already complete, and the relative clause merely adds a bit of information about him (it may or may not be important, but is not essential to the definition of the subject). A commenting clause should be within commas. A defining clause should not. This is not an arbitrary rule; it is a utilitarian one. If you do not observe it, you may fail to make your meaning clear, or you may even say something different from what you intended. For instance:
A particular need of the moment is provision for young women, who owing to war conditions have been deprived of normal opportunities of learning homecraft …
Here the comma announces that the relative clause is a commenting one, designed to imply that the mass of young women had this need, with war conditions as the explanation. Without the comma the clause would be read as a defining one, limiting the need to the particular young women who had in fact been deprived of these opportunities (‘those young women who owing to war conditions have been deprived …’).
The commas are definitely wrong in:
Any expenditure incurred on major awards to students, who are not recognised for assistance from the Ministry, will rank for grant …
The relative clause must be a defining one, but the commas suggest that it is a commenting one, and imply that no students are recognised for assistance from the Ministry.
In the next quotation too the relative clause is a defining one:
I have made enquiries, and find that the clerk, who dealt with your query, recorded the name of the firm correctly.
The comma turns the relative clause into a commenting one and implies that the writer has only one clerk. The truth is that one of several is being singled out, and this is made clear if the commas after clerk and query are omitted.
The same mistake is made in:
The Ministry issues permits to employing authorities to enable foreigners to land in this country for the purpose of taking up employment, for which British subjects are not available.
The grammatical implication of this is that employment in general is not a thing for which British subjects are available.
An instruction book called ‘Pre-aircrew English’, supplied during the war to airmen in training in Canada, contained an encouragement to its readers to ‘smarten up their English’, adding:
Pilots, whose minds are dull, do not usually live long.
The commas convert a truism into an insult.
(4) The insertion of a meaningless comma into an ‘absolute phrase’. An absolute phrase* always has parenthetic commas around it, e.g. ‘then, the work being finished, we went home’. But there is no sense in the comma that so often carelessly appears inside it. For instance:
The House of Commons, having passed the third reading by a large majority after an animated debate, the Bill was sent to the Lords.
The first comma leaves the House of Commons in the air waiting for a verb that never comes.
(5) The use of commas in an endeavour to clarify faultily constructed sentences. It is instructive to compare the following extracts from two documents issued by the same department:
It should be noted that the officer who ceased to pay insurance contributions before the date of commencement of his emergency service, remained uninsured for a period, varying between eighteen months and two-and-a-half years, from the date of his last contribution and would, therefore, be compulsorily insured if his emergency service commenced during that period.
Officers appointed to emergency commissions direct from civil life who were not insured for health or pensions purposes at the commencement of emergency service are not compulsorily insured during service.
Why should the first of these extracts be full of commas and the second have none? The answer can only be that, whereas the second sentence is reasonably short and clear, the first is long and obscure. The writer tried to help the reader by putting in five commas, but all this achieved was to give the reader five jolts. The only place where there might properly have been a comma is after contribution, and there the writer has omitted to put one.
Another example of the abuse of a comma is:
Moreover, directions and consents at the national level are essential prerequisites in a planned economy, whereas they were only necessary for the establishment of standards for grant-aid and borrowing purposes, in the comparatively free system of yesterday.
The proper place for in the comparatively free system of yesterday is after whereas, and it is a poor second best to try to throw it back there by putting a comma in front of it.
(6) The use of a comma to mark the end of the subject of a verb, or the beginning of the object. It cannot be said to be always wrong to use a comma to mark the end of a composite subject, because good writers sometimes do it delib
erately. For instance, one might write:
The question whether it is legitimate to use a comma to mark the end of the subject, is an arguable one.
But the comma is unnecessary. The reader does not need its help. To use commas in this way is a dangerous habit; it encourages writers to shirk the trouble of arranging each sentence so as to make its meaning plain without punctuation.
I am however to draw your attention to the fact that goods subject to import licensing which are despatched to this country without the necessary license having first been obtained, are on arrival liable to seizure.
If the subject is so long that it seems to need a boundary post at the end, it would be better not to use the slovenly device of a comma but to rewrite the sentence in conditional form:
if goods subject to import license are despatched … they are on arrival …
And in the following sentence, the comma merely interrupts the flow:
I am now in a position to say that all the numerous delegates who have replied, heartily endorse the recommendation.
Postponement of the object may get the writer into the same trouble:
In the case of both whole-time and part-time officers, the general duties undertaken by them include the duty of treating without any additional remuneration and without any right to recover private fees, patients in their charge who are occupying Section 5 accommodation under the proviso to Section 5 (I) of the Act.
This unlovely sentence obviously needs recasting. One way of doing this would be:
The general duties undertaken by both whole-time and part-time officers include the treating of patients in their charge who are occupying Section 5 accommodation under the proviso to Section 5 (I) of the Act, and they are not entitled to receive additional remuneration for it or to recover private fees.
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