The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by
Lynne Truss, 2004

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“ I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“ Panda. Large black-and-while bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.
”

To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1995, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first
Russian Revolution

Punctuation is a system of printers’ marks that had aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium, and if its time had come to be replaced, let’s just use this moment to celebrate what an elegant and imaginative job it did while it had the chance.

Caring about matters of language is unfortunately generally associated with small-minded people, but that doesn’t make it a small issue.

The Seventh Sense
“Come inside, for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s”
“Two Weeks Notice”
“Can you spare any old records”
“eight items or less”
“The judges decision is final”

While some people look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind for our plight. Those people are like the little boy in The Sixth
Sense who can see dead people, except that they can see dead punctuation.

Punctuation Defined
• The basting that holds the fabric of language in shape.
• The traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
• The courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.
• The line along which the train (composition, style, writing) must travel if it isn ’t to run away with its driver.

When punctuation is not used
• Language come apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off.
• Words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead.
• A sentence no longer holds the door open for you to walk in , but drops it in your face as you approach.
• You and your writing will go off-line with your words dead and scattered around.

Punctuation marks are traditionally either “separators” or “terminators”.

Punctuation is being governed
“Two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste ”
G.V. Carey, Mind the Stop,
Cambridge University Press, 1939

Examples
• A woman without her man is nothing
• A woman, without her man, is nothing
• A woman: without her, man is nothing

Examples
It is under these circumstances that we feel constrained to call upon you to come to our aid should a disturbance arise here the circumstances are so extreme that we cannot but believe that you and the men under you will not fail to come to the rescue of people who are so situated.
Put the period after the word “aid” once then after “here” and see the change in meaning.

Examples
• “Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off”
• “Charles the First walked and talked. Half an hour after, his head was cut off”

Why a cat is not a comma?
A cat has claws at the ends of its paws.
A comma ’s a pause at the end of a clause.

The Tractable Apostrophe
Means in Greek “turning away” and hence “omission” or “elision”
• In the 16 th century
First picked up and used to mark dropped letters
• In the 17th century
Intruded before the “s” in singular possessive cases
“the girl’s dress”
• In the 18th century
Put after plural possessives as well “ the girls’ dresses ”

Apostrophe's Tasks
Indicates a possessive
• Singular noun
– The boy’s hat
• Plural without s
– The children’s playground
• Regular plural
– The boys’ hats

Apostrophe ’s Tasks
Indicates time or quantity
• In one week’s time
Indicates omission of figures in dates
• The summer of ’68
Indicates the omission of letters
• We can’t go to Jo’burg
• It’s your turn
• It’s got very cold

• The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands for “it is” or “it has”.
• If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has ” then what you require is “its”.
• Thank God its Friday
• Thank God it’s Friday

No matter that you have a Ph.D. and have read all of Henry James twice.
If you still persist in writing,
“Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

Apostrophe ’s Tasks
Features in Irish names
• O’Neill and O’Casey
– The O in the Irish names is an anglicisation of
“ua”, meaning grandson.
Indicates the plurals of letters
• How many f’s are there in Fulham?

Apostrophe ’s Tasks
Indicates plurals of words
• What are the do’s and don’t’s?
• Are there too many but’s and and’s at the beginning of sentences these days?

The Lifted Task
• It no longer has to appear in the plurals abbreviations ( “MPs”) or plural dates
( “1980s”).

Apostrophe ’s Tasks

That ’ll Do, Comma
Thurber and Ross
• “Why to you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living room ’?”
• “This particular comma, was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
”

“No dogs please”
Only one person in a thousand bothers to point out that actually the statement is an indefensible generalization, since many dogs do please.

That ’ll Do, Comma
• Means in Greek “a piece cut off”
• Adopted in the 16 th century
• Purpose was to guide actors, chanters and readers-aloud indicating the pauses, accentuating matters of sense and sound.
• Aldus Manutius the Elder invented the italic typeface and printed the first semicolon

That ’ll Do, Comma
• Aldus Manutius the Younger stated in
1566 that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax.
• Two distinct function
– Illuminate grammar of a sentence
– Point up rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow.

Comma ’s Tasks
Commas for lists
• The four refreshing fruit flavors of Opal
Fruits are orange, lemon, strawberry and lime.

Comma ’s Tasks
The Oxford comma
• The flag is red, white, and blue
• I went to the chemist, Marks & Spencer, and NatWest.
• They tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.
( three or four instructions )

Comma ’s Tasks
List of Adjectives
Use the comma where an and would be appropriate.
• It was a dark, stormy night.
• He was a tall, bearded man.
Do not use a comma for
• It was an endangered white rhino
• The grand old Duke of York had ten thousand men.

Comma ’s Tasks
Commas for joining
Complete sentences with conjunctions as and, or, but, while and yet
• The boys wanted to stay up until midnight, but they grew tired and fell asleep.
• I thought I had the biggest bag of fruits, yet
Cathy proved me wrong.

Comma ’s Tasks
Commas before direct speech
• The queen said, “Doesn’t anyone know it’s my birthday?
”
Commas setting off interjections
• Stop, or I’ll scream.

Comma ’s Tasks
Commas that come in pairs
(weak interruption)
• I am, of course, going steadily nuts
• Nicholas Nickleby, published in 1839, uses a great many commas.
(should be removed)
• The leading stage director, Nicholas Hytner, has been appointed to the Royal National
Theatre.

Comma ’s Tasks
Important grammatical point
• The people in the queue who managed to get tickets were very satisfied.
Some people did not get tickets
• The people in the queue, who managed to get tickets, were very satisfied.
Everyone got tickets

A Grammatical Point
• If the clause between the commas is
“defining”, commas are not needed.
– The Highland Terries that live in our street aren ’t cute at all
– The Highland Terries, when they are barking, are a nightmare.

Comma ’s Big Final Rule
Don ’t use commas like a stupid person
• Leonora walked on her head, a little higher than usual.
• The driver managed to escape from the vehicle before it sank and swam to the river-bank.
• Don’t guess, use a timer or watch.
• The convict said the judge is mad.

Airs and Graces
The Colon and Semicolon
• They are about expectation and elastic energy.
Like internal springs, they propel you forward in a sentence towards more information.
• Semicolon lightly propels you in any direction related to the foregoing.
• The colon nudges you along lines already subtly laid down.

• The colon delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words.
– Tom has only one rule in life: never eat anything bigger than your head.
– I pulled out all the stops with kerry-Anne: I used a semicolon.
– I loved Opal fruits as a child: no one else did.
– You can do it: and you will do it.

– Man proposes: God disposes.
– I find fault with only three things in this story or yours, Jenkins: the beginning, the middle and the end.
Colons introduce the part of a sentence that exemplifies, restates, elaborates, undermines, explains or balances the preceding part.

• Colons start lists (especially lists using semicolons)
• They set off book and film sub-titles from the main titles:
– Ghandi II: The Mahatma Strikes Back

• The main place for a semicolon is between two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as “and” or “but”.
– It was the baying of an enormous hound; it came from over there!
– I remember him when he couldn’t write his own name on a gate; now he ’s Prime Minister

Indispensable Semicolon
• Fares were offered to Corfu, the Greek island;
Morocco; Elba, in the Mediterranean; and Paris.
Margaret thought about it. She had been to Elba once and found it dull; to Morocco, and found it too colorful.
•
Special Policeman Semicolon (for comma fights)

Sense changes with punctuation
• Tom locked himself in the shed. England lost to Argentina.
• Tom locked himself in the shed; England lost to Argentina.
• Tom locked himself in the shed: England lost to Argentina.

exclamation mark, dash, italic, question mark
• Exclamation mark is used to salute, admire, emphasize, irony, e-mail salutations.
• Whereas a dash is used to connect (or separate) sentences, the hyphen is used to connect (or separate) individual words.
• Italics are used for,
– Titles of books, emphasis of certain words, foreign words, examples on language

exclamation mark, dash, italic, question mark
• Question mark is used when the question is direct.
– What is the capital of Belgium?
– What was the point of all this sudden interest in Brussels, he wondered.
•
• The ellipsis appears in e-mails and shorthand, meaning “more to come”.

Double Dashes
• Bracketing device o He was (I still can ’t believe this!) trying to climb in the window.
o He was -I still can ’t believe this!- trying to climb in the window.
Can you tell the difference?

• Round brackets (called parentheses in US)
• Square brackets [called brackets in US]
• Brace brackets {derived from maths}
• Angle brackets <linguistic and technical uses>
• Angle shape the earliest to appear
• Brackets (as for a bookshelf ) lift up a section of the sentence, holding it above the rest.

• Add information, clarify, explain and illustrate.
– Starburst (formerly known as Opal Fruits) are available in all corner shops.
• Square brackets for clarifying direct quote, and enclosing ellipsis
– She had used [Tom Jones] for far too many examples by this stage.

• Very specific uses
– Indicate word missing … from a quoted passage
– Trail off in a intriguing matte …

• Name comes from the Greek.
• Uses of the hyphen,
– Avoid ambiguity (re-formed, re-mark)
– Spell out numbers (thirty-two, forty-nine)
– Link nouns with nouns (London-Brighton train)
– Link adjectives to adjectives (American-
French relations)
– Noun phrase qualifies another noun
(stainless-steel kitchen, corrugate-iron roof)

• Uses of hyphen (continued)
– Certain prefixes (anti-Apartheid, quasi-steady)
– Spell out certain words (K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M)
– Avoid letter collision (de-ice, shell-like)
– Indicate unfinished word that continues on the next line
– Hesitation and stammering (I reached the ww-w-w-watering can)
– Qualify a hyphenated phrase beforehand (He was a two- or three-year-old.)

Merely Conventional Signs
• Emotions are the proper name for smileys.
 :-) happy :-( sad
 ;-) winking :-r tongue sticking
 :~/ mixed up <:-) dunce (stupid)
 :-[ pouting :-O surprise
• Text message and verbal shorthand
• “CU B4 8?”

Computers, Reading and Writing
• With text messaging and emailing becoming such compulsive universal activities, reading and writing are now more a fact of everyday life than they have ever been.
• “The human linguistic faculty seems to be in good shape. The arrival of Netspeak is showing us homo loquens at its best ”
David Crystal

A Last Word
• Proper punctuation is both the sign and cause of clear thinking.
• We should fight like tigers to preserve punctuation, and we should start now.
• The purpose of punctuation is “to tango the reader into the pauses, inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey.
”
Thomas McCormack.