So just as loudly, for the people up there in the cheap seats: A person can be a “that.”
When Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics of the song “The Man That Got Away,” he knew precisely what he was doing. The man that got away, the teachers that attended the conference, the whoevers that whatevered.
A thing, by the bye, can also be a “who,” as in “an idea whose time has come,” because you certainly don’t want to be writing “an idea the time of which has come,” or worse. (Though worse might not exist.)
5. “None” Is Singular and, Dammit, Only Singular.
If you can find fault with the sentence “None of us are going to the party,” you have an ear better attuned to the English language than mine.*10
“None” can certainly be used singularly, if that which is to be emphasized is a collection of discrete individuals: “None of the suspects, it seems, is guilty of the crime.” But if you mean to emphasize the feelings, or actions, or inactions, of a group as a group, none of us copy editors are going to stop you from doing that.
6. “Whether” Must Never Be Accompanied by “Or Not.”
In many sentences, particularly those in which the word “whether” is being used as a straight-up “if,” no “or not” is called for.
Not only do I not care what you think, I don’t care whether you think.
But see as well:
Whether or not you like movie musicals, I’m sure you’ll love Singin’ in the Rain.
Try deleting the “or not” from that sentence and see what happens.
That’s the whole thing: If you can delete the “or not” from a “whether or not” and your sentence continues to make sense, then go ahead and delete it. If not, not.
7. Never Introduce a List with “Like.”
“Great writers of the twentieth century like Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, and William Faulkner…”
Screech of brakes as a squad car of grammar police pulls that burgeoning sentence to the side of the road and demands that “like” be replaced with “such as.”
I confess to some guilt here, as, like many of us, I had it drummed into my head that inclusive lists should be introduced exclusively with “such as,” and that to commence such a list with “like” suggests comparison. By that logic, in the example above, Wharton, Dreiser, and Faulkner may be like great twentieth-century writers but are not themselves great twentieth-century writers.
But who could possibly read such a sentence and think such a thing?
And that’s often the problem, isn’t it? In writing and in so many things: that we accept things we’re taught without thinking about them at all.
This particular nonrule, I eventually learned and you may be pleased to note, sprung up*11 only as recently as the mid-twentieth century, and it has little foundation in anything other than crotchet.
That said, there’s nothing wrong with the slightly more grand-sounding “such as.” But feel free to like “like.”
*1 That the French have had for centuries an académie that keeps a sharp and controlling eye on their language is why it’s easier for a modern French speaker to read and understand Molière than it is for a modern English speaker to read and understand Shakespeare.
*2 Oh, yes indeed. I’ll meet you in Chapter 9: Peeves and Crotchets.
*3 As a copy editor, I’m always on my guard for monotonous repetition, whether it’s of a pet word—all writers have pet words—or a pet sentence construction. Two sentences in a single paragraph beginning with the same introductory term, especially “But,” are usually one sentence too many.
*4 It’s not, I admit, entirely fair of me to present two isolated sentences and make a ruling about them. In copyediting, one is listening to the text not sentence by sentence but paragraph by paragraph and page by page, for a larger sense of sweep and rhythm.
*5 Latterly and laudably rewritten to “To boldly go where no one has gone before.” Relatedly, on some not too distant page I’ll touch briefly on the mess of sexism and poor prose construction that is the plaque we humans left on the Moon back in 1969.
*6 Were you taught not to use “etc.” and to either spell it out as “et cetera” or to use “and so on” or something in that vein? So was I. Oh well.
*7 By zombies.
*8 After failed attempts to read Oliver Twist and Great Expectations—doubtless failed because it was easier, and quicker, to watch the movies—I picked up Bleak House, about which I knew nothing, and was immediately and utterly enthralled, starting with Dickens’s dinosaur shout-out. It always struck me as weirdly out of place in this most Victorian of novels, but as a Dickens specialist eventually pointed out to me, Dickens always had his eye on what the public found fascinating at that precise second and, showman that he was, made good use of it. Which is why one should not be surprised—though almost everyone I know who’s read Bleak House remarks on their utter WTF delight when they first got to it—at the eventual appearance in the novel of an instance of—spoiler alert—spontaneous human combustion. I mean, wow.
*9 One might, I suppose, argue that the second half of the bit beginning “As much mud” constitutes a complete and freestanding sentence. I’m not in the mood to make that argument, but you feel free.
*10 Or the ears of people with such flavorful names as H. W. Fowler, Wilson Follett, and Roy H. Copperud, among others.
*11 Hold on there, People Who Think They Know Better and Write Aggrieved Emails to Publishing Houses. “Sprung” rather than “sprang” is perfectly correct. Look it up.
IF WORDS ARE THE FLESH, MUSCLE, AND BONE OF PROSE, punctuation is the breath. In support of the words you’ve carefully selected, punctuation is your best means of conveying to the reader how you mean your writing to be read, how you mean for it to sound. A comma sounds different than a semicolon; parentheses make a different noise than dashes.
Some writers use as many bits of punctuation as they can think of. (The Mr. James quoted above often used so much of it, you’d think he was being paid by the dot and squiggle.) Some use as few as they can get away with.
Some writers use punctuation with impressionistic flair, and as a copy editor I do my best to support that, so long as the result is comprehensible and consistent.*1 Not all punctuation is discretionary, though. Typing or not typing even so much as a comma—in fact, especially a comma—can convey key information. The more regular and, you’ll pardon the word, conventional your writing, the more, I’d suggest, you use punctuation in a regular and conventional fashion.
A general note: I’ll cover here the punctuational issues/problems/knots/dilemmas I’ve most often encountered—the greatest hits, let’s say—and those I think are most interesting. Any given piece of writing is going to present unique challenges—not just in punctuation—and those can be addressed only on a case-by-case basis. I’m also going to skip the kinds of punctuational quandaries that show up so infrequently they still send me scurrying for one of my big fat stylebooks. Which is what big fat stylebooks are for, so do keep yours handy, right next to this relatively slender, potent missive.
Another general note, which also happens to be a cultural one: I’ve observed over these last few decades that writers of all sorts use increasingly less punctuation. I guess it’s part of the common tendency to be in a great big hurry. No harm with that reduction, and I’m sure you’ll find some other use for this comma or that hyphen.
PERIODS
1.
Q. Two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence, right?
A. Wrong. I know that back when you were in seventh-grade typing class and pecking away at your Smith Corona Coronet Automatic 12, Mrs. Tegnell taught you to type a double space after a sentence-ending period, but you are no longer in the seventh grade, you are no longer typing on a typewriter, and Mrs. Tegnell is no longer looking over your shoulder. Either br
eak yourself of the habit or, once you’ve finished writing whatever it is you’re writing, do a global search-and-exterminate for double spaces, which will dispose of not only end-of-sentence offenders but those that have crept into your text between words as you cut, copied, pasted, and otherwise revised. If you don’t, I will.*2
2.
The fashion of punctuating acronyms and initialisms*3 with periods has, well, gone out of fashion, so one is far less likely nowadays to see F.B.I. than FBI, U.N.E.S.C.O. than UNESCO, etc. Insofar as academic degrees are concerned, I’m less keen on BA, MD, and PhD (rather than B.A., M.D., and Ph.D.), though I’m getting used to them, especially for the sorts of degrees that run to four or more letters, and especially in the service of those learned sorts who festoon their names with multiple degrees,*4 and am happy to save my instinctual squabbling for something else.*5
3.
Those two-letter state abbreviations that the USPS—which I’m still tempted to style U.S.P.S. but won’t—likes to see on envelopes (MA, NY, CA, and the like) do not take periods. They also shouldn’t appear anywhere else but on envelopes and packages. In bibliographies and notes sections, and anywhere else you may need to abbreviate a state’s name, please stick to the old-fashioned and more attractive Mass., N.Y., Calif., and so on. Or just be a grown-up and write the whole thing out.
4.
Some of us have a hard time dropping the periods from the abbreviation U.S., perhaps simply out of habit, perhaps because US looks to us like the (shouted) objective case of “we.” Some of us were also taught to use U.S. (or that other thing) only as an adjective, as in “U.S. foreign policy,” and to refer to the country nounwise only full-out as the United States. I persist in that distinction, because…because I do.
5.
Feel free to end a sentence shaped like a question that isn’t really a question with a period rather than a question mark. It makes a statement, doesn’t it.
COMMAS
6.
On arrival at Random House, I was taught that we had no house style. That is, each manuscript got the attentive copyedit it uniquely needed, and copy editors didn’t perform any one-size-fits-all-whether-you-like-it-or-not Bed of Procrustes routine, applying this or that particular rule of punctuation, grammar, etc., to every manuscript, regardless of its needs, in the service of some house-proud notion of universal correctness.
Well, that was not entirely true. We did have one house standard, to be applied to each and every manuscript we squired through the process:
THE SERIES COMMA
The series comma is the comma that separates the last two bits in a list of words or phrases before the concluding conjunction “and” or “or” or sometimes even “but,” as in:
apples, pears, oranges, tangerines, tangelos, bananas, and cherries
The “bananas, and” comma. That’s the series comma.
Quite possibly you know this comma as the Oxford comma—because, we’re told, it’s traditionally favored by the editors of the University of Oxford Press. But as a patriotic American, and also because that attribution verges on urbane legendarianism, I’m loath to perpetuate that story. Or you may be familiar with the term “serial comma,” though for me “serial” evokes “killer,” so no again.
Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don’t want to belabor the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it. Only godless savages eschew the series comma.
No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one.
In a tote-up of grocery items, as above, the series comma ensures that the final two items in a list aren’t seen as having a special relationship, aren’t seen after a number of singletons as somehow constituting a couple. In a more complicated sentence, the use of the series comma simply makes it clear that once I’ve made some particularly deft point, deftly said everything I have to say on the subject, and moved on to a final deft point, the reader doesn’t trip from the penultimate deft point to the ultimate deft point thinking that it’s all one big deft point.
Many journalist types, I’ve observed, abhor the series comma because they’ve been trained to abhor it and find its use as maddening as its champions find its nonuse infuriating. Many Brits, including even Oxford Brits, also avoid it. For whatever it’s worth to you, everyone I’ve ever encountered in U.S. book publishing uses it.
One thing, though: Commas can’t do everything, not even series commas. There’s a sentence, reputed to have shown up in The Times,*6 often schlepped out in defense of the series comma, and though I’m weary of seeing it, I schlep it out myself to point out its weakness as a series-comma defense. So here it is, hopefully for the last time in all our lives, though I doubt it:
Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.
Oh la la, one is intended to merrily note, is Nelson Mandela really an eight-hundred-year-old demigod and a dildo collector?
Oh la la, I note, even if one sets a series comma, as in:
Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod, and a dildo collector.
Mandela can still be an eight-hundred-year-old demigod.
Some sentences don’t need to be repunctuated; they need to be rewritten.*7
7.
Re the school of “Apply the series comma when it’s needed for clarity and not when it’s not needed for clarity”:
7a. One person’s clarity is another person’s “Huh?” Writers who profess to adhere to this notion, I find, often apply the series comma precisely where it might be skipped with no loss in clarity and skip it precisely where it’s desperately needed.
7b. It uses up fewer brain cells simply to apply the damn thing every time, brain cells that might well be applied in the cure of more serious issues, like grammatical blunders and one’s overuse of the word “murmur.”
8.
Exception to the rule: An ampersand in a series rather than an “and”—this sort of thing tends to turn up in book or film titles, the names of law firms (and other companies that want to invest themselves with the cachet of law firms), and nowhere else, but it’s a thing to know—negates the necessity of a series comma, mostly because the result would be unsightly. Thus, oh, say:
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
and certainly not
Eats, Shoots, & Leaves
which is a bit belt-and-suspenders, don’t you think?
9.
You might well, if you’re relatively sparing with your commas, write
On Friday she went to school.
or
Last week Laurence visited his mother.
So long as the commaless rendition is clear and understandable, you’re on safe ground.
The longer the introductory bit, the more likely you are to want/need a comma:
After three days home sick with a stomachache, she returned to school.
On his way back from a business trip, Laurence visited his mother.
10.
But do avoid crashing proper nouns, as in
In June Truman’s secretary of state flew to Moscow.
Lest you want your reader wondering who June Truman is and what precisely got into her secretary of state.
Or take note of the sentence above I initially composed as beginning, “On arrival at Random House I was informed,” which might set you, if only for a millisecond, to speculating about Random House II and Random House III.*8
11.
Sometimes a comma makes no sense at all.
Suddenly, he ran from the room.
Makes it all rather less sudden, doesn’t it.
12.
A comma splice is the use of a comma to join two sentences w
hen each can stand on its own—as in, just picking an example out of more or less thin air:
She did look helpless, I almost didn’t blame him for smiling at her that special way.*9
As a rule you should avoid comma splicing, though exceptions can be and frequently are made when the individual sentences are reasonably short and intimately connected: “He came, he saw, he conquered” or “Your strengths are your weaknesses, your weaknesses are your strengths.” Another exception arises in fiction or fictionlike writing in which such a splice may be effective in linking closely related thoughts or expressing hurried action and even a semicolon—more on the glorious semicolon below—is more pause than is desired.
Another thin-air example, from Walter Baxter’s undeservedly obscure 1951 novel Look Down in Mercy:
He had never noticed [the sunset] before, it seemed fantastically beautiful.
As comma splices go, this one’s not doing anyone any harm, and there’s no issue here with comprehension, so let’s let it go.
The result of a comma splice is known as—and you may well recall this term from middle school English class—a run-on sentence. One may meet a fair number of people who like to aim that term at any old sentence that happens to be long and twisty and made up of any number of innumerable bits divided by semicolons, dashes, parentheses, and whatever else the writer may have had on hand. Nay. A long sentence is a long sentence, it’s only a run-on sentence when it’s not punctuated in the standard fashion. Like that one just now.
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