Punctuate in Style

I intended to follow up the first blog on punctuation straight away with yet more commas and colons, and I feel a bit guilty about my tardiness. I attribute it to the way things deliberately foil me just when I'm about to get started. You know what I mean: the pen which wilfully hides behind the router, or the vanishing password crib sheet which you keep in a code that even you  can't understand sometimes. However, since punctuation is such an essential element of style I have hauled myself to the sticking post.

Style it used to be said was ‘proper words in proper places’, how you make plain to your reader what you hope to convey in the most concise, clear and elegant way. It relates not only to the words you choose, the emplacement of passages within your text and the elements which they include, but also to the actual mechanics of the writing, the structure, the building blocks of your prose.

Punctuation plays a vital role in this aspect of style, fulfilling two functions, the logical and the rhetorical. This is because the stops, as punctuation marks used to be called, not only help with the logical understanding of the text, how you indicate subject, object, subordination and so on, but also contribute rhetorically to its emotional impact by indicating emphasis and pace. Punctuation can heighten the effect of the words which you, the writer, have so carefully chosen and regulate the pace at which the reader’s eye takes them in,  It can do this in several ways. Thrillers, for example, usually have short sentences and minimal punctuation, especially in the final scenes, as this speeds up the pace. Lots of subordinate clauses, separated by commas or other punctuation marks, slow things down. Think of Armitage’s amber light of the semi-colon.

As an example of how punctuation can alter pace and contribute to emphasis take the following sentence: The man running towards her tripped, stumbled and fell at her feet, blood still flowing from the gash on his head.

Now suppose it is punctuated this way: The man running towards her tripped. Stumbled. Fell at her feet, blood still flowing from the gash on his head.*

This produces a much more staccato effect and makes us pay more attention to the individual words, stumbled and fell, so we see the way he falls. Here the commas have been removed and been replaced with full stops, but more often than not we’re wondering whether we should put the comma in. Dickens was very fond of commas and semicolons as were most writers of his era but the general principle these days is the fewer commas the better. HW and FG Fowler, authors of The King’s English, recommend writing out the text without any punctuation and then adding only those marks you feel are needed to make the meaning  plain or to prevent ambiguity.

The so-called Oxford comma is employed for this reason, often in cases where there is a list. Usually there is no comma before the final and of a list. In the sentence ‘She bought cheese, bacon, eggs and bread,’  for example, there’s no comma after the eggs. However, Ms Cock-Starkey, of Hyphens and Hashtags fame, gives the following apocryphal and, it must be said, unlikely example:

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.

This seems to say that Ayn Rand and God are the author’s parents  Without getting into the theological nitty-gritty of this, one imagines that the person was not saying that their parent was God, or even that Ayn Rand was, so an Oxford comma would help solve the ambiguity. 

This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand, (Oxford comma) and God.

On the unrelated subject of my writing being sabotaged by my habitual loss of any writing implement  I might be using at the time I see that Robert Graves attributed this phenomenon to theft by Lollocks. Lollocks, he said, are born in the backs of all disordered cupboard drawers, where they play hide and seek among collars and novels and empty medicine bottles and letters from abroad that will never be answered.  He said that on hot nights they plague little children, gurgling in the cistern, humming in the air, skewing up the bedclothes, twitching the blind; and when old people are abed the Lollocks come skipping up the stairs and are nasty together in the bed’s shadows. 

He wrote in the last century so these days we’d have to add obsolete chargers, empty biros and  ancient mobile phones to the clutter at the backs of our drawers but  the Lollocks will probably find a use for those as well.  They might even find the odd Oxford comma.

  *Taken from Changelings by Jaye Sarasin

Jaye Sarasin is the author of  The Green Enclave (Parfoys Press 2017) and Using Literature in Language Teaching (Macmillan, 1986) Former teacher/translator, now living in Yorkshire.