Punctuation junction, what's my function?
Dec. 5th, 2003 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynOn the Better Buffy Fics list, some engineer guy made the proclamation recently that bad punctuation shouldn’t keep a story from being considered good. I begged to differ so strongly I couldn’t possibly reply and not flame him. We’d just recently got an eyeful of a story sent by mistake to the list, and it had notable lines such as “He’s not a man Willow.” Well, no, he’s not a man Willow nor a woman Willow, nor a man bitch, nor anything else. This guy’s contention was that commas like that don’t make a difference. And if you’re that kind of reader who doesn’t get punctuation, then I guess the writer’s inabilities don’t matter, but most people need the words on the paper to help them comprehend what’s happening, which is punctuation’s raison d’etre. When people say that punctuation doesn’t matter, what they’re saying is that they don’t care enough to try — few people who misuse punctuation or can’t do the basics have the mechanical ability to write a truly great story as well. Punctuation is like clothing — if you show up with no pants on, or your shirt has huge burn holes and food stains, or your dress is cut in half, most people notice that, and may think it’s indicative of sloppiness, mental or emotional problems, etc. People who break punctuation rules and takes risks with flair and style almost always have a good grounding in the basics — once you know the rules, you know how to break them. It’s obvious to most mid- to high-level readers the difference between someone breaking rules for form and style, and someone who doesn’t know the rules at all.
Before, I talked about comma abuse, particularly its lack of use or misplacement. Another form of comma confusion comes from overuse. I told folks that commas go where we naturally pause in speech, but the problem is, not everyone hears the pause, and not every pause requires a comma. It’s tough to catch on to, but with a little bit of studying up on it, you can get the hang of it, and the knowledge will stick around. A couple rules of thumb can get you over most of the hurdles: don’t separate a verb from its subject or object, and don’t set off restrictive (necessary) clauses or phrases (yeah, I know, it’s gibberish) with a comma.
Don’t separate verbs from subjects/objects means that you don’t want to shove the comma in between the thing you’re talking about and what the thing is doing. So “Angel yelled at me, to use the stake on his opponent” would be bad, because the actiony part to use the stake is being separated from the person who’s being requested to do the actiony part (at me). You don’t want to separate those verbs (whether it’s an action verb or a to be verb) from the people or things you’re discussing by using a comma — in each example here, you’d take out the comma I’ve incorrectly put in: Most long-lived immortals, are experienced in swordplay. Fraser’s favorite place to be, is the Great White North of Canada when it’s covered with winter snow.
The other problem is setting off restrictive clauses — I won’t bore you with the grammar, but a restrictive clause or phrase is necessary to define who or what you’re talking about. So anytime you get a bunch of descriptive phrases that are crucial in defining the main part of your sentence (as opposed to being like this, a parenthetical statement that isn’t necessary to the reader’s understanding), don’t make it harder for your reader to know what refers to what. All of these sentences have commas where they don’t belong, separating the clauses or phrases: Everyone, at CTU, needs to have their lethal airborne virus shots this week or they’ll die. Melodramatic music played as the two gunslingers, threw down against each other on the main street of Laredo. Cowley berated Bodie and Doyle for their mishandling, of the car park bomb, that resulted in dozens of deaths.
There’s a lot of other comma misplacement boo-boos that fan writers make (particularly separating adjectives from their nouns, like “Angel’s old, fast, black, convertible — where that last comma is el wrongo), but the two above are the most pervasive, and the most helpful to understand. Once you know those, a lot of the other things fall into place. It’s tough to get the hang of knowing which pause requires a comma and which doesn’t (and of course, many people would probably erroneously write that as “it’s tough, to get the hang of), but if I can get it, you can, too!
Which takes me to the ugly cousin of the comma: the period, or full stop in British English. Whoa, doggies, does such a simple thing upset so many people, especially when the period comes as part of a set in ellipses or is mishandled in dialog. A period’s main function is to end a sentence. Most of us know this. It’s when you end a sentence inside a quotation, usually dialog, that all sensibility seems to fly out the window in fanfic. Here’s the deal — the period in a regular, garden-variety American English sentence does not go inside the quotation unless you’re ending the quotation there, and not continuing on by providing an attribution of who said it, and how they said it (“Sydney said” would be an attribution). Where it does go is after the attribution of who said it and how they said it, or the second half of the dialog if you split the quotation up. Rather than write wrong, bad, and wrong dialog and mold impressionable minds in the wrong direction, I will write all these examples correctly, so that you can follow them and do it right. Do it right! Or dammit, I will hunt you down and kill you. Kidding. Only if you live in the Northwest; otherwise you’re safe. From me, at least. But I know people with concealed weapons permits in other cities, and you don’t want to provoke them.
If you do all your dialog like these examples, you will impress everyone with your astonishing command of punctuation. Scout’s honor.
Of course, all this differs slightly in BE, because they put the punctuation outside the quotation marks, but the punctuation rules themselves are still the same. And in AE, we use periods for abbreviations such as Mr. and Ms., but in BE, they usually don’t. For the most part, I don’t see nearly as much confusion over periods on abbreviations and initialisms (like CTU or FBI vs. U.S.) as I do on the dialog thing. The dialog punctuation affects probably about 80-90% of fanfic, so it’s a fairly big issue.
The period is also used as part of another form of punctuation that can turn many of us into screaming lunatics — ellipsis points, or ellipses (three equally spaced periods). Ellipses are used to indicate an omission in text, a trailing off or hesitation of thought or dialog, and that’s it. And ellipses have one of two formats — three evenly spaced dots to indicate the hesitation or trailing off, to indicate a missing part of a passage of text, or omission inside a quoted sentence; or four dots if you’ve omitted text between two full sentences — the first dot is really the period belonging to the sentence before the part you’re omitting.
They don’t travel in large packs of five to ten, or couple themselves into two. They don’t add variety to the page by filling out the end of your line in a group of fifty. They don’t substitute for full stops between sentences. They don’t substitute for any other punctuation mark at all. No, ellipses are their own creatures, happiest when they’re a trio, even okay as a quartet. I like ellipses, I think they’re a much better way of indicating a hesitation or trailing off in conversation the way we humans do, than a long dash (another punctuation mark I’ll get into someday, just for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shellmidwife), but their misuse in fandom has made a lot of people hate the poor things. So if you’re writing dialog, and the person is kind of stumbling or contemplating as they speak, you’d write something like this: “After all these years,” Kirk said, “you still don’t know that I’m . . . sublimating my desire for you through this . . . this mindless sex with hundreds of women?” You want to be careful not to use them too often. Even if people tend to be hesitant or confused in their speech, overuse of this makes readers freak out. Mentally, they’re slowing down as they read, so be careful you don’t slow the reader down so much that they lose interest. Or fall asleep.
It will be rare for a fan writer to use the four dot ellipses, because we don’t quote much material from a lengthy passage with multiple sentences. It’s simple (end of sentence. . . . Ellipses show the missing material), just the three dots of the ellipsis points, after the period ending the previous sentence. Easy peasy. Nothing screams ignorance like misuse of ellipses — it doesn’t make writing cooler or eclectic to use tons of ellipsis points, nor does it make you a hipster rule-breaking stylist to use them in place of other punctuation. There’s a woman on one of my e-mail lists who uses them in place of everything........ lots of them............. so that all her posts are filled with tons of ellipses............ and I’ve stopped reading anything she writes............................as have many others.
HTML has kind of made proper use of ellipses a bit more difficult, in that when you space them properly, they can make line breaks on different sized screens go haywire. Many of us have adopted an online style, where we don’t space between the dots; rather, we type them close to the last word, bunched up, then space before the next word... like that, so lines break better in HTML. And Word users should note this — the special character that Word assigns to ellipses often doesn’t translate if you copy your Word doc into a WYSIWYG Web program such as Dreamweaver, Go Live, or others. The “special character” (which, I’d like to point out, is WRONG anyway) can show up differently, or disappear altogether (which happens to me all the time in PageMill). If you use the execrable “Save as Web Page” command in Word and upload your stories to the net that way (never good, because Word creates huge, bloated files), your ellipses may not come over in certain browsers. It’s best to turn off your autotype and autoformat functions for things like ellipses, ordinals (the st, nd, and th on numbers like 1st and 4th), and so on, if you plan to use your documents on the web. Just a tip from someone who has to do this every day.
More punctuation to come. But next time I want to get some of my peeves out of the barn, put a yoke on ‘em, and put 'em to work.
Before, I talked about comma abuse, particularly its lack of use or misplacement. Another form of comma confusion comes from overuse. I told folks that commas go where we naturally pause in speech, but the problem is, not everyone hears the pause, and not every pause requires a comma. It’s tough to catch on to, but with a little bit of studying up on it, you can get the hang of it, and the knowledge will stick around. A couple rules of thumb can get you over most of the hurdles: don’t separate a verb from its subject or object, and don’t set off restrictive (necessary) clauses or phrases (yeah, I know, it’s gibberish) with a comma.
Don’t separate verbs from subjects/objects means that you don’t want to shove the comma in between the thing you’re talking about and what the thing is doing. So “Angel yelled at me, to use the stake on his opponent” would be bad, because the actiony part to use the stake is being separated from the person who’s being requested to do the actiony part (at me). You don’t want to separate those verbs (whether it’s an action verb or a to be verb) from the people or things you’re discussing by using a comma — in each example here, you’d take out the comma I’ve incorrectly put in: Most long-lived immortals, are experienced in swordplay. Fraser’s favorite place to be, is the Great White North of Canada when it’s covered with winter snow.
The other problem is setting off restrictive clauses — I won’t bore you with the grammar, but a restrictive clause or phrase is necessary to define who or what you’re talking about. So anytime you get a bunch of descriptive phrases that are crucial in defining the main part of your sentence (as opposed to being like this, a parenthetical statement that isn’t necessary to the reader’s understanding), don’t make it harder for your reader to know what refers to what. All of these sentences have commas where they don’t belong, separating the clauses or phrases: Everyone, at CTU, needs to have their lethal airborne virus shots this week or they’ll die. Melodramatic music played as the two gunslingers, threw down against each other on the main street of Laredo. Cowley berated Bodie and Doyle for their mishandling, of the car park bomb, that resulted in dozens of deaths.
There’s a lot of other comma misplacement boo-boos that fan writers make (particularly separating adjectives from their nouns, like “Angel’s old, fast, black, convertible — where that last comma is el wrongo), but the two above are the most pervasive, and the most helpful to understand. Once you know those, a lot of the other things fall into place. It’s tough to get the hang of knowing which pause requires a comma and which doesn’t (and of course, many people would probably erroneously write that as “it’s tough, to get the hang of), but if I can get it, you can, too!
Which takes me to the ugly cousin of the comma: the period, or full stop in British English. Whoa, doggies, does such a simple thing upset so many people, especially when the period comes as part of a set in ellipses or is mishandled in dialog. A period’s main function is to end a sentence. Most of us know this. It’s when you end a sentence inside a quotation, usually dialog, that all sensibility seems to fly out the window in fanfic. Here’s the deal — the period in a regular, garden-variety American English sentence does not go inside the quotation unless you’re ending the quotation there, and not continuing on by providing an attribution of who said it, and how they said it (“Sydney said” would be an attribution). Where it does go is after the attribution of who said it and how they said it, or the second half of the dialog if you split the quotation up. Rather than write wrong, bad, and wrong dialog and mold impressionable minds in the wrong direction, I will write all these examples correctly, so that you can follow them and do it right. Do it right! Or dammit, I will hunt you down and kill you. Kidding. Only if you live in the Northwest; otherwise you’re safe. From me, at least. But I know people with concealed weapons permits in other cities, and you don’t want to provoke them.
“Kill him,” Giles demanded. (Basic declarative sentence in dialog — the comma separates the dialog from the attribution, and the period says “Here endeth this sentence.”)
Skinner wanted to know how someone could spend that many years in the FBI and still not know their badge number. (Basic declarative sentence that contains an indirectly quoted question. Notice no comma after that introductory phrase.)
“You let a wolf save your life,” Fraser commented bitterly, shaking his head, “and you pay, and pay, and pay.” (A quotation split by the attribution and description, and the sentence ends with a full stop inside the dialog. You do not put the period after the attribution/description unless you have no more dialog forthcoming.)
“Go ahead, hit me again!” he shouted. Daniel was such a whore for pain, I thought. (Notice, with your keen eyes, that the exclamation point doesn’t mean that the attribution of “he” gets a capital letter. You’re not beginning a new sentence, you’re still in the old sentence, because it’s dialog and the exclamation point acts almost like a comma. This rule is the same for a question mark – if I’d written “Hit me again?” he asked hopefully. it would be the same thing.)
If you do all your dialog like these examples, you will impress everyone with your astonishing command of punctuation. Scout’s honor.
Of course, all this differs slightly in BE, because they put the punctuation outside the quotation marks, but the punctuation rules themselves are still the same. And in AE, we use periods for abbreviations such as Mr. and Ms., but in BE, they usually don’t. For the most part, I don’t see nearly as much confusion over periods on abbreviations and initialisms (like CTU or FBI vs. U.S.) as I do on the dialog thing. The dialog punctuation affects probably about 80-90% of fanfic, so it’s a fairly big issue.
The period is also used as part of another form of punctuation that can turn many of us into screaming lunatics — ellipsis points, or ellipses (three equally spaced periods). Ellipses are used to indicate an omission in text, a trailing off or hesitation of thought or dialog, and that’s it. And ellipses have one of two formats — three evenly spaced dots to indicate the hesitation or trailing off, to indicate a missing part of a passage of text, or omission inside a quoted sentence; or four dots if you’ve omitted text between two full sentences — the first dot is really the period belonging to the sentence before the part you’re omitting.
They don’t travel in large packs of five to ten, or couple themselves into two. They don’t add variety to the page by filling out the end of your line in a group of fifty. They don’t substitute for full stops between sentences. They don’t substitute for any other punctuation mark at all. No, ellipses are their own creatures, happiest when they’re a trio, even okay as a quartet. I like ellipses, I think they’re a much better way of indicating a hesitation or trailing off in conversation the way we humans do, than a long dash (another punctuation mark I’ll get into someday, just for
shellmidwife), but their misuse in fandom has made a lot of people hate the poor things. So if you’re writing dialog, and the person is kind of stumbling or contemplating as they speak, you’d write something like this: “After all these years,” Kirk said, “you still don’t know that I’m . . . sublimating my desire for you through this . . . this mindless sex with hundreds of women?” You want to be careful not to use them too often. Even if people tend to be hesitant or confused in their speech, overuse of this makes readers freak out. Mentally, they’re slowing down as they read, so be careful you don’t slow the reader down so much that they lose interest. Or fall asleep.It will be rare for a fan writer to use the four dot ellipses, because we don’t quote much material from a lengthy passage with multiple sentences. It’s simple (end of sentence. . . . Ellipses show the missing material), just the three dots of the ellipsis points, after the period ending the previous sentence. Easy peasy. Nothing screams ignorance like misuse of ellipses — it doesn’t make writing cooler or eclectic to use tons of ellipsis points, nor does it make you a hipster rule-breaking stylist to use them in place of other punctuation. There’s a woman on one of my e-mail lists who uses them in place of everything........ lots of them............. so that all her posts are filled with tons of ellipses............ and I’ve stopped reading anything she writes............................as have many others.
HTML has kind of made proper use of ellipses a bit more difficult, in that when you space them properly, they can make line breaks on different sized screens go haywire. Many of us have adopted an online style, where we don’t space between the dots; rather, we type them close to the last word, bunched up, then space before the next word... like that, so lines break better in HTML. And Word users should note this — the special character that Word assigns to ellipses often doesn’t translate if you copy your Word doc into a WYSIWYG Web program such as Dreamweaver, Go Live, or others. The “special character” (which, I’d like to point out, is WRONG anyway) can show up differently, or disappear altogether (which happens to me all the time in PageMill). If you use the execrable “Save as Web Page” command in Word and upload your stories to the net that way (never good, because Word creates huge, bloated files), your ellipses may not come over in certain browsers. It’s best to turn off your autotype and autoformat functions for things like ellipses, ordinals (the st, nd, and th on numbers like 1st and 4th), and so on, if you plan to use your documents on the web. Just a tip from someone who has to do this every day.
More punctuation to come. But next time I want to get some of my peeves out of the barn, put a yoke on ‘em, and put 'em to work.
