Punctuation
Punctuation is a bit like lubricating oil: it keeps your words flowing.
We don’t use punctuation when we speak, but when we put words on paper, it’s essential to use punctuation with care in order to make sense of what we’re saying. Otherwise, the though is corrupted on its way to its audience.
Consider:
- A Piranha
- A Man taking lunch at Rick Stein’s sea-food restaurant in Padstow
Hard to confuse, eh?
Well, yes, if you’re talking about them. Context, intonation and stress will make it perfectly clear which one you mean.
But consider that man in Padstow: the man eating fish.
Only a simple but essential punctuation mark separates him from the Amazonian predator: the man-eating fish Serrasalmus nattereri.
To be crystal clear:
- is a man-eating fish
- is a man eating fish
There are several good works available on punctuation, but here we list just a few that are of particular interest for writing on the web.
Quotation Marks
Computer keyboards, closely related to their typewriter predecessors, economise on space by using little ticks as proxies for proper quotation marks. But these are not valid punctuation, as they don’t come in pairs.
‘Quotes’ need paired little-sixes and little-nines just as the possessive needs its ‘little nine’. Jumping up a few font sizes for clarity:
‘This’ is right; 'this' isn’t.
In Word you can switch on ‘smart quotes’ to fix this: it gives you both single and double quotes, and only occasionally pairs them up wrongly. But most text written for websites doesn’t use quotation marks properly, and mess like:
You said ''She said 'No'''
results.
Special Characters
To type a ‘little-nine’ for yourself, just hold down the ‘Alt’ key, and whilst doing so, type 0146 on the numeric keypad (so, not the top line of the keyboard, but using the keypad to its right). You can use this general method to type any odd characters, like ‘±’; the plus-or-minus sign. The code for this is ‘0177’. Use the Windows ‘Character Map’ to identify any other code you may need.
Hyphens
The Oxford University Press Style Manual says: “If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.” Well, if the writer goes bonkers making sure he’s right, that will at least save dozens or hundreds of readers from becoming confused.
Lynne Truss, in her best-selling book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, manages to miss out a required hyphen on the book’s cover. So it’s not an easy subject.
Going back to the fishy example at the start of this page, you’ll see that the difference between the man and the fish is just a hyphen:
The customer at the restaurant:
- A man eating fish
The Amazonian piranha:
- A man-eating fish
Obviously, this is a carefully chosen example, but it illustrates the danger of not considering your reader’s perspective and failing to understand that you may be leading him up the garden path.
The rule here is that words linked together to form an adjective need to be linked by hyphens:
- A not-to-be-forgotten rule
- A first-class service
- High-quality, line-caught halibut
Note that “carefully chosen” doesn’t take a hyphen: this is because carefully is an adverb. Most adverbs end with -ly, but fun is to be had with one that doesn’t: “well” (which sort-of means “goodly”).
We prefer to hyphenate with the adverb ‘well’, simply because making sense takes precedence over being strictly correct.
So we have:
- A well-designed solution
- A well-thought-of gentleman
But what does this mean:
- Well-caught halibut ?
In fact, if you meant that the fish was taken from a well, you’d have to re-cast your sentence so as to be clear. You should always be ready to do this if clarity is your first aim, and it should be.
- Halibut taken from a fresh-water well or line-caught at sea
is entirely unambiguous.