Finally, Punctuation for Irony.

Soon, people began using hashtags to add humor, context and interior monologues to their messages — and everyday conversation. As Susan Orlean wrote in a New Yorker blog post titled “Hash,” the symbol can be “a more sophisticated, verbal version of the dread winking emoticon that tweens use to signify that they’re joking.”… So, for instance, a messages that reads “3 hour delay on Amtrak #StimulusDollarsAtWork,” likely implies that the user does not, in fact, think that their stimulus dollars are hard at work.

Twitter’s Secret Handshake

 

On Exclamation Marks

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.

- F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It makes the writer’s day if he or she can include the opinions of a truly stupid character or text in the story, punctuating those announcements with exclamation points, which are the icing on the cake. This situation is to be found in novels, too, but novelists are less likely to be immensely flattered if you have noticed their needle in the haystack(!). For particularly adept and judicious uses of the exclamation point, see the works of Joy Williams and Deborah Eisenberg.

- The Book Bench

The problem with exclamation marks is that they often have the opposite effect to that intended. When you’re aiming for tense! or amazing! what you end up with is, quite simply, friendly.

pic by Daniel1977

That’s because these days, across the interwebby, exclamation marks are most often used to express friendship, not drama. Especially between women. This open letter to McSweeneys explains it so very well.

One thing is clear

Writers cannot rely soley upon exclamation marks to heighten drama. One writing ‘rule’ I often hear is ‘stay right away from exclamation marks’. But that’s not necessary, nor is it even desirable. Some sentences just don’t hit the right tone without an exclamation mark.

Instead, I think good advice sounds more like: ‘Make JUDICIOUS use of all punctuation – except full-stops, which are not optional.’

So, how to do exclamation well?

It’s hard to write an angry argument scene without any exclamation marks. Here are a few excerpts from the pros.

**SPOILER ALERT**

from Peeling the Onion by Wendy Orr

There’s usually at least one such scene in all young adult literature:

‘You took them out of my drawer! What happened to privacy – or did I lose that along with everything else?’

Mum flares as fast as me; suddenly we’re both screaming. ‘I’m worried about my child’s life and you complain about privacy!’

Then just as suddenly she’s crying. So am I. Crying with messy tears and drippy nose and lots of noise. Because I know which child she means. The one that can open childproof locks. The one who might have been looking for a way out.

And I know I can’t do it. I can’t hurt them that badly.

‘It’s okay, Mum, I promise. I won’t do anything. Promise.’

observations FROM THAT

1. Question marks seem to have an ‘exclamatory quality’ when mixed in with sentences ending in exclamation marks. I might try mixing them up. (Interestingly, an exclamation mark was used here where a question mark would have sufficed. An exclamation on the end of a question is effective too – probably because it’s less expected.)

2. The dialogue is minimal but powerful, and surrounded by dialogue beats which never seem to need exclamation marks, by the way. Modern exclamation only ever seems to be used in dialogue, not narrative).

3. There is a come-down. There’s always a cooling/settling period after an outburst, and the lack of exclamation marks in that piece following is all the more powerful because exclamation points were utilised earlier in the actual fight scene.

p.s. For anyone who thinks there’s a rule against using semi-colons in fiction, Wendy Orr’s book is an example of modern YA fiction in which the semi-colon is used extensively, even in dialogue. Semi-colons are to do with personal style. (And probably editorial style.)

Here’s another example of an argument in which non-use of the exclamation mark is effective:

“Snooping?” Clio repeated. “I went down to tell everyone that lunch was ready, and no one was in there. I walked into the room, I saw the computer, and I touched it. I didn’t use it. I touched it.”

“You expect me to believe that?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I do. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you go and ask Aidan if there’s anything weird about his computer? And you know what? I expect you to believe me over Julia. I’m your daughter.”

Without realizing it, she had started to yell.

- from Girl At Sea by Maureen Johnson

The last sentence alerts the reader to the fact that the conversation was shouty rather than calm, and in this case telling rather than showing works better.

FROm two girls, fat and thin by mary gaitskill

Here’s a particularly tough scene to write if ever I heard one: A grown daughter tells her mother that she was raped by her father as a teenager.

“Mother,” I said. “I don’t want to go.”

She didn’t look surprised. Her body went into its habitual posture of readiness to receive pain, and then I saw her gather herself to argue with me. She began with the ‘difficulties’ between my father and me. We talked round the fact of what had happened; I felt angrier and angrier. I backed away from my feelings, using the conversation to parry and evade them. Unknowing, my mother cornered me, stripping away my defenses as fast as I could secure them. My feelings pressed against my control like the fists and feet of a baby trying to punch free of the womb.

We paused for a moment. There was a light sweat on my forehead. A thin layer of composure constrained my anger. If she had remained silent only a little longer, the layer might have thickened enough to protect us both, but she said, at that fragile moment: “Can’t you be big enough to forgive him, Dotty? Can’t you stop thinking of your problems just this one time?”

Her face recoiled from my expression, she put her hand to her throat as though in self-protection, and then my words garrotted her. “No mother,” I said, “no I can’t forget about everything but fuck me, again and again. You know, incest? You watch television, don’t you?”

Her face confirmed my worst fear; she was not surprised by what I’d said, but wounded to the death that I’d said it.

Whatever I noticed about Wendy Orr’s scene applies equally to Mary Gaitskill’s scene. In her book, Mary Gaitskill also makes much use of:

1. Detailed Description Of Body Language. Perhaps it is true of abused children that they tend to be hypervigilant of body language, tone of voice, facial expressions and so on. Dorothy Never (the first person narrator) is therefore a perfect example of a person who would be able to recall such details. The details themselves are gutwrenching, and their power would only be sapped by making use of exclamation marks.

2. Metaphorical Language. Here she makes use of an apt simile: ‘My feelings pressed against my control like the fists and feet of a baby trying to punch free of the womb.’

Later on, Gaitskill does make use of exclamation marks in an interesting way. One of the characters gets animated in a cafe, and embarrasses the woman she’s with with her enthusiasm:

“I’m not talking about that hippie free-love merde either. I’m talking about passion between responsible adults.” The shadows on the wall of teh Euella Parks Hotel! The traffic noise outside! The dark-haired girl stared at her as she got up to leave.

In this case, Gaitskill makes full use of the melodramatic qualities of the exclamation mark, which make one character seem crazy obsessive. The fact that the exclamation marks fall outside the dialogue somehow create more of this impact.

Related Post: Bang! How the Exclamation Mark Makes Us Into Comic Book Characters.

Spelling and Hyphenation

They drove a couple of miles down a rough country road — having turned off a decent unpaved country road — and there was a place for cars to park, with no cars in it at present. The sign was roughly painted on a board and needed retouching.

CAUTION: DEEP-HOLES.

Why the hyphen? Sally thought. But who cares?

- from Deep-Holes, by Alice Munro

pic by goron

Some people can spell.

Some people just can’t. The ability to spell — from what I can see — is similar to a sense of direction or a loathing of blood.

1. You can’t do a helluva lot about it. Rote memorisation of spelling lists isn’t of much help due to the sheer number of words in English, and because — well — if poor spellers were any good at remembering spellings simply by exposure, they wouldn’t be poor spellers in the first place. All of us in Western culture are surrounded by many, many words every single day of our lives, whether we read books or not.

2. So spelling prowess is not related to how much you read.

3. Nor is it related to intelligence (however that happens to be measured). I’ve known avid readers who can’t spell for nuts. I know very good spellers who don’t read much at all.

I’m a pretty good speller, through no special effort on my part. There are certain words I just can’t remember (broccoli springs to mind), but the thing is:

I usually know to look at a word when I have spelt it wrong.

I figure this is something non-spellers (shall we say?) just don’t have. For whatever reason. Like me and my non-sense of direction.

Besides, autocorrect is a marvellous thing, especially for those of us who can basically spell. (Hopeless — and dangerous — if you’re nowhere near.)

But I do have sympathy for those who can’t spell, because when it comes to HYPHENATION, I’m equally stuffed.

THE HYPHEN RANT

I can’t remember for the life of me which compounds are meant to take a hyphen or not. I’m not even sure there are rules. Except a conscientious comb-through with MS Word’s grammar checker will always throw up a number of words which should have been hyphenated rather than bunged together as one. Unfortunately, MS Word is rubbish at the reverse job: ie. Telling me which words should not be hyphenated.

So I usually end up with far more hyphens than necessary. I’m one of those people who has to go back and edit OUT the hyphens.

Hate is a strong word, I know. But hyphens are a pain in the butt. It doesn’t matter how long I stare at a pair of closely related words, I could not say, for love nor money, whether there’s meant to be a hyphen in there somewhere. I’m still not sure if there are any universal conventions regarding hyphenation in English, and I tend to run with that thought, slapping them in willy-nilly (see?), just in case. I still hate them.

I have an alternative.

How about we all just start making use of camelCase, otherwise known as medial capitals? Let’s leave hyphens for linebreaks that occur midword. (See, the red squiggly line here at WordPress tells me ‘linebreaks’ is not a word. Nor is ‘midword’.)

I love camelCase.

It’s spaceEfficient, modern, and computerProgrammers make use of it all the time, so it must be logical. If writers made use of camelCase in every instance of ambiguity, the (my?) world would be a happier place.

Related Link: What kind of speller are you?

Sign Into Chat

It’s worth doing a final check for prepositions when editing a draft.

Whenever I’m using gmail I see the phrase ‘sign into chat’ on the left hand side of the screen. (I’m never signed in, you see. I have enough internet distractions as it is.)

Thing is, I think it should be ‘sign in to chat’ – ‘sign in’ two words.

If we were to make that sentence into a tree diagram, ‘sign in’ would be linked, because it is a compound verb: ‘sign in’. Those two words belong together.

(BTW, there’s more than one way to diagram that sentence, depending on how it’s interpreted. It can either be short for ‘Sign in in order to have a chat with someone’, or ‘chat’ may be taken as a noun.)

*

Since ‘in’ belongs to ‘sign’, it shouldn’t form part of the word ‘into’.

Some writers seem to have a natural sense of prepositions, and never make mistakes.  For anyone not like that, bear in mind that it does matter. The placement of a preposition does make a difference to reading ease, and sometimes to meaning. (In the example above ‘sign in’ is a completely different word from ‘sign’.)

Another example:

I am curious to see how this will tie into the BitTorrent case ruling made earlier this month…

- Slashdot

‘Tie in’ is a compound verb, so in should not be part of ‘into’.

COMPOUND VERBS

In English we have ‘compound verbs’: multi-word compounds that act as single verbs. One subset of compound verbs comprises an ordinary verb + a preposition, which specifies the verb’s meaning:

• light up >> The sky lights up with fireworks.
• put in >> I’ll put in my submission this afternoon.
• come out >> He’ll come out of the closet one of these days.

It’s usually good style to keep each word of a compound verb together, without sticking anything else in between. Some instances sound worse than others:

• He lit a cigarette up. >> He lit up a cigarette.
• I put the submission in this afternoon. >> I put in the submission this afternoon.
• (Note that ‘come out of the closet’ can’t be split. It’s an intransitive verb.)

p.s. I think this is the real problem some people still have with hanging prepositions.

Likewise, it’s not good grammar to take the ‘in’ of a compound verb and shove it onto ‘into’, or to take the ‘up’ and turn it into ‘upon’. I know it’s tempting, when another preposition follows a compound verb, but it doesn’t read well.

That’s why I always do a final check for prepositions at some stage of editing.

General Rule Of Headlines

General rule of headlines: if it ends with a question mark, the reason is because the answer to the question is ‘no’.

Morven, on TV Tropes forum

Commonwealth vs American Punctuation

With globalisation and the internet, and the political weight of America influencing the rest of the world, there is limited value in discussing The Commonwealth and America as if they’re two non-intersecting polarities. Yet there remain certain things about any sample of writing which will mark its origin as either North American or Other.

That’s the division I’m talking about here, limited as it is.

When it comes to logic and spelling, America wins. Who really needs that decorative ‘u’ in colour? Ditto for numerous double consonants (carburetor, caliper, jewelry etc.), and who can be bothered memorising the difference between -ise and -ize? Let’s just spell every instance with a ‘z’. The ‘z’ could really do more to earn its keep, after all.

When it comes to punctuation, however, I prefer Commonwealth conventions. Here are 3 reasons why.

1. FULLSTOPS AND SPEECH MARKS

Commonwealth Convention: When embedding a quotation inside a sentence, where the last word of the sentence equals the last word of the quotation, put the full-stop on the outside the closing quotation mark.

Tony said to tell you to ‘get stuffed’.

Common American Usage:Put the full-stop inside the closing quotation mark.

Tony said to tell you to ‘get stuffed.’

(Authentic examples here.)

Why I don’t like this: The full-stop marks the end of the entire sentence, not just the end of the quotation, so it just doesn’t belong on the inside of the quotation marks, where the assumption is that it has been quoted, ie. pulled in from elsewhere, along with the quote. Well, it hasn’t. The sentence needs a full-stop of its own, whether it includes a quote or not.

2. EM-DASHES AND TYPOGRAPHY

Commonwealth Convention: The em-dash appears with a space on either side.

American Convention: The em-dash is longer than the British unicode, and most often appears with no space on either side.

Why this is inconvenient: eBooks. If you come across a word in an eBook and you want to highlight it, copy and paste it or look it up in the dictionary, you can’t do that if it’s attached to an em-dash on one or both sides. That’s because, according to a computer, the American em-dash and the words either side of it comprise a single word. Computers are dumb, you see. That’s why, for eBooks, the British convention is more convenient.

If you’re wondering how to type a British em-dash on a PC (without relying on autocorrect), it’s Ctrl + the minus key on your number pad.

If you’re wondering how to make the American em-dash, I’m not going to tell you. I want it dead.

Dashes are such powerful punctuation that we’re not trusted with a dash key. A dash takes 2 hyphens, just as a nuclear sub takes 2 keys.

- @studiesincrap

3. FULLSTOPS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Commonwealth Convention: A full stop/period is used only when the last letter of the abbreviation is not the last letter of the complete word.

Mr Happy

American Convention: Mr. Happy

My preference: Who needs more dots? Especially if you’re typing on a phone or a tablet or any number of equally annoying devices.

Though I did just discover that, for iPad, you get a full-stop by pressing the spacebar twice. Cool. I’ll spend the extra years saved watching trashy TV and writing scintillating blog posts on minor matters of punctuation.

Condescending Punctuation?

Paraphrased below:

two typical writing-group bitch fights. These discussions crop up regularly in writing groups: different people, same-old, same-old.

pic by cutesmallfuzzy

You need to read Lynne Truss or something. You can’t punctuate for shit.

Lynne Truss? That cow who made heaps of money off something that’s not even new? Pfft. A whole book on apostrophes. Why waste your time reading that when you could be writing? Anyway, that book is for people who already understand punctuation. Anyone who understands Eats, Shoots and Leaves must understand punctuation. It’s not that I don’t understand, it’s just that it’s boring as shit. You’re boring me. Talk to the hand. La la la la la.

But when you don’t punctuate properly, as your reader, I’m tripped up. Every. Single. Time. Don’t you see? I shouldn’t even notice the punctuation if it’s done right.

Get over yourself. This is a draft. If this gets published, that’s what my copy-editors are for. I’m not asking you to be my copy editor. I’m asking you to comment on my story.

I can’t see your story unless you punctuate properly. It’s a COURTESY TO THE READER.

It’s an early draft! I’ll punctuate it when it’s finished. (Maybe.)

Doesn’t matter. If you want me to read it, you’ve got to put in the apostrophes.

*

What’s up with your punctuation? Where are your speech marks, for instance?

Ah, yes. I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy doesn’t use speech marks. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to find a handful of commas in The Road. If McCarthy doesn’t use speech marks, we don’t have to either. He’s on the vanguard, man. Punctuation is so yesterday.

Yeah but no but, yeah but no but, that’s McCarthy for you. You and me, we’re not McCarthy. We can’t get away with that kind of hubris. And what about all this dropping the g’s off the end of words? What’s with that? Why don’t you just go ahead and spell your words properly. All this attempt at dialect, it’s tiring on the reader and, to be honest, your work is starting to sound like a pastiche.

Hubris? Did you say ‘hubris’? Are you saying I’m arrogant? Am I an arrogant, condescending git for leaving out speech-marks and dropping off the g’s?

If you like. That is a form of arrogance, yes, expecting readers to do extra work because you can’t be arsed with speech marks around direct dialogue.

On the contrary, I find OVER punctuation more of an arrogance. My readers are not idiots. They know from my line breaks that this is dialogue. Only a fool would think this sentence here wasn’t dialogue, with or without the speech marks. And what do you expect me to do about the g-dropping?

You can’t just drop off g’s.

Why not? Do you want me to put in an apostrophe, to let any damn-fool readers know that a g has been omitted? You think they don’t know?

Why not just spell words correctly? And punctuate according to established conventions?

You think unless I do everything by the book my readers won’t know what the hell I’m writing about? You think unless I put a foreign word in italics my reader won’t recognise it as foreign in origin? You think unless I put a comma before tag-questions my reader won’t know it’s a tag-question? Grrr. You say I’m arrogant, but look at you, you boring, condescending, pedantic shit.

Related Link: On Punctuation Gimmicks

The Changing Apostrophe

pic by Leo Reynolds

Some play it safe and stick an apostrophe before every ultimate ‘s’. Others play safer and leave all apostrophes out.

On the one hand, apostrophes aren’t that hard. Not like quantum theory. On the other hand, there are annoying anomalies, and the rules are in constant flux.

Take this sentence:

All employees will be provided with internet in two weeks time.

Does that need an apostrophe to you? It does to me.

All  employees will be provided with internet in two weeks’ time.

Yet many editors are now leaving this kind of apostrophe out.

Now take the following sentence:

Internet use is restricted to employees own time.

Doesn’t that need an apostrophe?

YES.

Internet use is restricted to employees’ own time.

So why leave it out only with the plural of time nouns:

weeks, hours, minutes etc?

• two weeks time
• three hours break
• four minutes silence

HMMM? Doesn’t make sense to me.

• two weeks’ time
• three hours’ break
• four minutes’ silence

THIS IS SHORTHAND FOR:

• two weeks of time
• three hours of break
• four minutes of silence

Actually, it’s not all about time words. Here’s another interesting real-life example of a sentence in which the apostrophe might easily have been omitted:

Their TV show Spaced and two feature collaborations Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are repeatedly pored over by like-minded movie buffs who appreciate all the references to pictures’ past.

- from a Quickflix review of Paul.

Would you have put an apostrophe in there? To be honest, I’m not sure if I would have remembered, but it makes perfect sense.

And after I’ve thought about that for a while, I’ll go and engage in something useful.

On Inverted Commas

Here is the opening paragraph from ‘Apt Pupil’, a short story by Stephen King. I have changed one thing about it. Can you see what it is?

He looked like the total ‘all-American’ kid as he pedalled his twenty-six-inch Schwinn with the ‘ape-hanger’ handlebars up the residential suburban street, and that’s just what he was: Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a ‘healthy’ one hundred and forty pounds, hair the colour of ‘ripe corn’, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not even the first ‘shadow’ of adolescent acne.

Yeah. I’ve ruined it.

I’ve taken every instance of original language use and put those words inside inverted commas. I’ve gone completely overboard to hammer it home, but if even one of these phrases had been enclosed inside inverted commas I would have been pulled out of the story.

I dislike inverted commas in fiction as much as I like air-quotes in conversation and I think they should be avoided.

• It’s as if the writer has snapped on rubber gloves, dealing with his very own work with an antiseptic look on his face. This distances the writer from his own words and therefore distances the reader. It also makes the writer seem timid.
• Either that, or the writer is drawing attention to her own cleverness.
• Or, the writer doesn’t trust the reader to pick up on his  special words. The reader is pulled up, forced to focus on words when the story’s the thing.
• Look at me! Look at me! I just cracked a ‘joke’!

I’m no ‘fan’.