You have impeccable content! Flawless spelling! But your blog is going over like a lead balloon. Maybe that garbled punctuation is making your writing harder to read than Egytian Hieroglyphics?
These punctuation tips are going to make your dense tangle of words as easy to read as Dr. Suess.
- Commas – ,
Commas are the equivalent of regular braking in your car, nothing dramatic, just slows you down. It’s better to use too many commas than too few. They work beautifully in lists, and lists often come in three’s, like so many things in life: “he sought her here, there and everywhere”. Notice you seldom use a comma before and, which is a conjunction. But there are crazy people out there who subscribe to the serial comma aka the Harvard comma, which is for people who believe you can never have too many commas, even before the and at the end of the list, as in: “He ate tomatoes, pickles, and rutabagas.
- Semi-Colon – ;
Semi-colons are your friend, they both cause an abrupt slow-down in your writing and link two mini-sentences that aren’t strong enough to be complete sentences on their own into one full sentence. A semi-colon stops a run-on sentence dead in its tracks.
Here’s a sample sentence with a semi-colon:
“My blind date introduced herself; she had a mustache that would make Mark Twain green with envy.”
- Colon – :
No, it’s not an internal organ. It’s the stepbrother of the semi-colon. It’s more of a stop than a semi-colon, and it has more drama than a semi-colon. It links two sort-of sentences and can be the start of a list.
Here’s a sample sentence:
“The president of the company had been siphoning funds for years: singlehandedly, he ruined the company.”
See how it makes the second half of the sentence more dramatic?
Here’s a colon used to start a list:
“I decided I had to get out in the see the world: Saugus, Mass., Danvers, Mass. and eventually, Beverly, Mass.
- Period – .
Everyone is a Jedi Master when it comes to periods. You just stick them at the end of a sentence. A period is the equivalent of jamming on the brakes; the sentence is over. Nothing to elaborate here, they’re as simple as blinking your eye.
But! When you have a sentence that ends with “Beverly, Mass.” you never use two periods, the abbreviation for Mass. does double duty as a period.
It isn’t quite an official use of periods, but you can use three periods to create a melancholy tone, as in:
“She walked out of the house forever…”
- Exclamation Marks – ! – And Question Marks –? –
An exclamation mark is the equivalent of a shout: “Watch out for that moose!” and a question mark asks a question, “Did you bring the wine?”
Nothing to elaborate here, except only use one question mark or exclamation point per sentence. A lot of people can’t help themselves; they want to amp up their sentence by: “You let an eight year old drive the car!!!” Multiples of either are strictly for amateurs. Let the sentence create the drama, not the amount of exclamation marks/ question marks.
- Em Dash –
Em Dashes create a pause in the sentence to allow you to insert supplementary information without losing the sentence’s train of thought.
Here’s one in action:
“Jack thought of all the disappointments in his life – the shoes that were too small, his girlfriend’s cat, Maroon 5 – and decided he’d move to France where these things wouldn’t be a problem.”
Notice that you click the spacer bar once before an em dash and once after; that creates the sense of space to interject the related thought without cramping the main sentence’s style.
Please note: in Microsoft Word, you can make an em dash by typing two hyphens back to back.
- Hyphens –
Hyphens aren’t glamorous, like a semi-colon, but they are useful tools to add to your writing arsenal. Basically, hyphens are the glue that holds phrases together. Here’s a few examples:
- State-of-the-art
- Off-campus
- Insert-your-expression-here
They can also add clarity to a sentence. The first example is a sentence without a hyphen, the second, same sentence, hyphen added.
“Bayonne has little town charm.”
“Bayonne has little-town charm.”
Now you have to take the hyphen pledge: “I vow never to use a hyphen where an em dash belongs.” Using a hyphen instead of an em dash is worse than a 73 year old man wearing a white sock and a black sock while wearing Birkenstock leather sandals with runner’s shorts.
- Parentheses – ( )
Parentheses sounds like someone out of the Old Testament. Rather, it allows you to include relevant information to your sentence, boxed between your two ( ), that would require several sentences to say otherwise. You can stick parentheses within a sentence, such as this:
“There are numerous times, (brushing your teeth, strumming your harp, shopping at Walmart), where Zen Buddhism assumes great clarity.”
*Note: the punctuation occurs before and after the parentheses, not in it.
You can also have a complete sentence in parentheses that remarks on the sentence that precedes it:
“Jack assured me he wasn’t lost.” (“As if the fact we zig-zagged across the whole state of Indiana while trying to get across town proved otherwise”.) In this case, punctuation is inside the parentheses.
And then there’s more mundane uses for parentheses:
- Numbered or lettered lists; (1) or, (A)
- Times zones – 9:34 AM (EST)
- Area codes – (978)
- Year of birth – Keith Richards (1537) (he just looks that old; he was born in 1943)
- Abbreviations – “He was appointed CEO (Chief Executive Officer)”
Parentheses add order and make combinations of words and numbers easy to read and separate.
- Quotation Marks – “ “
Promise me you’ll never use your first two fingers on both hands to simulate quotation marks while you are talking. Save them for your blogs.
Quotation marks are great. They’re kind of like periods, everyone nails them. They simply tell the reader someone is talking. Since I’m on a roll, I’ll briefly cover rules involving quotations. It’s important to learn how to use commas and periods with quotation marks.
- Here’s an example of a period when using quotation marks:
- “I lost my mind,” said Sarah.
- Here’s an example of quotation marks with commas.
- “A priest, a rabbi and a minister walked into a bar,” Sarah said, “and the bartender gives them the evil eye.”
So, the comma pauses the sentence and keeps it becoming an unwieldy run-on juvenile delinquent.
Another important rule: when one person speaks and stops and another person begins talking, to keep it clear whose talking, never have different people talking in the same paragraph. Everyone gets a paragraph of their own.
If someone in your writing won’t stop talking, divide what they’re saying into multiple paragraphs to keep it from becoming a solid impenetrable block of words hogging the whole page. So long as the same person keeps talking, you don’t end each paragraph with quotation marks; using them means someone has finished speaking. But you start every new paragraph with a quotation mark, to indicate they’re still spewing out their monolog. When the finally relent and stop talking, you close with quotation marks. Here’s an example:
“The rabbi ordered a gin and tonic, the minister, a gimlet and the priest had a beer. It was a very wild scene. So much so, someone called the cops.
“That’s when the parrot walked into the car. ‘And what are you having?’ asked the bartender. The parrot just looked bemused.”
Note that the first paragraph doesn’t end with quotation marks and when Sarah, the narrator, quotes the bartender, instead of using this: “ “, you use: ‘ ‘ – Single quotes.
- Italics – Italics
Italics are great for adding emphasis. Such as:
“His breath was devastatingly bad,” thought Virginia.
It’s a brilliant tool.
- Underlining – Underlining
Underlining is the old fashioned version of italics, another great way to show emphasis. The nice thing about underlining a word or passage for emphasis is that it also visually makes the words easier to see. The opposite is true with italics. Too many words in italics looks like you’ve suddenly begun writing in one of the romance languages.
CONCLUSION:
Masterful punctuation makes your writing superb!
Someone told me they took driving lessons from an extravagant instructor in Mexico City. She was having trouble getting her rear view mirror adjusted. The instructor said, “Don’t worry about what’s behind you; the past is the past.” Let’s apply that philosophy to the rest of the punctuation marks, there’s not many left and they’re not as important as the ones we’ve covered. Sorry, angle brackets.
It’s really easy to master punctuation, there’s not many rules like, ‘i before e except after c’, and using them with flourish is both a joy, but more important, the really important part, is that punctuation makes your brilliant writing exceptionally easy to read and to understand.
