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MAKING WORDS WORK FOR YOU: A refresher course in Grammar and Punctuation![]()
Punctuation needn’t be a pain: Stops, Commas and Other Marks
Sentences start with a Capital letter,
So as to make your writing better.
Use a full stop to mark the end –
It closes every sentence penned.
Victorian schoolmistress’s Rules of Punctuation
Punctuation is the clear presentation of the written language. Or as The Times advises its journalists, it is ‘a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling’.
It may help you to know something about its past. Two centuries ago most punctuation took its cues from speech. This was a period when the predominant practice of reading aloud, with its pauses and dramatic stresses, was translated into written punctuation – rhetorical punctuation.
A hundred years on, with increased literacy, the spoken word gave way to the written. The stress now was on meaning rather than dramatic effect, and rhetorical (or oratorical) punctuation bowed to a more logical system.
Today we have a blend of both: a system capable of conveying force, intonation, urgency, tension, rhythm and passion while never abandoning its duty to consistency and clarity of meaning.
Punctuation probably reached its zenith in the late 19th century, helping to make sense of fashionably-long sentences. The rules were fairly rigid, too. Now, the grammatical rules are more relaxed. Sentences, heavily influenced by the brevity of much newspaper usage, are shorter; the need for the complicated division of long sentences has disappeared. Commas are freely dropped where the meaning remains unaffected. The full stops after an abbreviation are disappearing in a general quest for typographic neatness.
Most people using the English language probably go through life without ever putting on paper any punctuation marks other than the comma, dash and full stop.
But while that may do for the majority it will be of little use to anyone who wants to be a better-than-average writer. The role of punctuation in writing good English cannot be underestimated. If your knowledge of this art is full of holes, or a bit rusty, here’s a brief refresher course that should help banish confusion with capitals, hassles with hyphens and catastrophes with apostrophes.
Units of Space: sentences and paragraphs
Space is a basic form of punctuation. It separates words, sentences, paragraphs and larger units of writing such as chapters.
The sentence is about the most common of all grammatical units. We speak in sentences, and the most untutored letter-writers among us will use them while ignoring every other form of punctuation.
So what is a sentence? A sentence should express a single idea, complete in thought and construction. Like this:
The sentence can be quite elastic, and punctuation allows us to expand it:
You’ll notice how the cunning commas have allowed us to double the length of the sentence, adding fresh information without losing any of its original clarity. But sentences can also shrink, sometimes alarmingly:
That single word, provided it is given meaning by other words or thoughts surrounding it, is a sentence, or, more correctly, a sentence fragment:
You can see here that not only the surrounding words, but also a range of spaces and punctuation marks, help to give that single word the meaning intended.
A question that crops up with worrying regularity is, ‘How long should a sentence be?’ The pat answer is, neither too long nor too short. Short sentences are easier to take but an endless succession of staccato sentences can irritate the reader. Conscientious writers will read their work aloud or mentally aloud as they proceed; that way the sentences are likely to form themselves into a logical, interesting, economical and, with luck, elegant flow of thought.
Probably the best definition of a paragraph is that of Sir Ernest Gowers: ‘a unit of thought, not of length . . . homogenous in subject matter and sequential in treatment of it.’ Perhaps, but of all the units of punctuation the paragraph is the least precis...
