or
Were Oscar Wilde’s last words truly “Either that wallpaper goes or I do”?*41
What happens when both the quoted material and the surrounding sentence demand emphatic or inquiring punctuation? Does one truly write
You’ll be sorry if you ever again say to me, “But you most emphatically are my dear friend!”!
or
Were Oscar Wilde’s last words truly “I’m dying, do you seriously think I want to talk about the decor?”?
No, one does not. One makes a choice as to where the ! or the ? might more effectively reside. (In the examples above, I’d opt to retain the second exclamation point and the first question mark.) Or one simply rewrites to avoid the collision entirely.
48.
In American English, we reach first for double quotation marks, as I’ve been doing above all this time. If one finds the need to quote something within quotation marks, one then opts for single quotation marks. As in:
“I was quite surprised,” Jeannine commented, “when Mabel said to me, ‘I’m leaving tomorrow for Chicago,’ then walked out the door.”
Should one find oneself with yet another layer of quoted material, one would then revert to double quote marks, thus:
“I was quite surprised,” Jeannine commented, “when Mabel said to me, ‘I’ve found myself lately listening over and over to the song “Chicago,” ’ then proceeded to sing it.”
Do, though, try to avoid this matryoshka punctuation; it’s hard on the eye and on the brain.
Moreover, I caution you generally, re quotes within quotes: It’s quite easy to lose track of what you’re doing and set double quotes within double quotes. Be wary.
49.
Though semicolons, because they are elusive and enigmatic and they like it that way, are set outside terminal quotation marks, periods and commas—and if I make this point once, I’ll make it a thousand times, and trust me, I will—are always set inside.
Always.
HYPHENS
50.
If you turn to p. 719 in your Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, eleventh edition, you will find, one atop the other:
light-headed
lighthearted
Which tells you pretty much everything you want to know about the use of hyphens, which is to say: It doesn’t make much sense, does it.
If you type “lightheaded” (I note that my spellcheck dots have not popped up) or “light-hearted,” the hyphen police are surely not going to come after you, and I won’t even notice, but:
If you’re invested in getting your hyphens correctly sorted out in compound adjectives, verbs, and nouns, and you like being told what to do, just pick up your dictionary and look ’em up. Those listings are correct.
51.
That said, you will find—if you’ve a penchant for noticing these things, professionally or otherwise—that compounds have a tendency, over time, to spit out unnecessary hyphens and close themselves up. Over the course of my career I’ve seen “light bulb” evolve into “light-bulb” and then into “lightbulb,” “baby-sit” give way to “babysit,” and—a big one—“Web site” turn into “Web-site,” then, happily, “website.”*42
How and why do these changes occur? I’ll let you in on a little secret: Because you make them happen. Yes, you, right there. You grow impatient with the looks of, say, “rest room” (“I mean, it’s not a room you rest in, is it?”), so you stick a hyphen in it, coexist with “rest-room” for about twenty minutes, then quickly tire of the hyphen and, boom, “restroom.” Multiply this times hundreds of compounds, and watch the language whoosh into the future before your very eyes. Then watch the dictionary keep up with you, because that’s how it works. As a lexicographer friend once confided over sushi, the dictionary takes its cues from use: If writers don’t change things, the dictionary doesn’t change things.
If you want your best-seller to be a bestseller, you have to help make that happen. If you want to play videogames rather than video games, go for it.
I hope that makes you feel powerful. It should.
52.
If that revelation didn’t make you go all lightheaded, let’s hunker down and focus on a few particular points.
For the sake of clarity, we use hyphens to helpfully link up a pair or passel of words preceding and modifying a noun, as in:
first-rate movie
fifth-floor apartment
middle-class morality
nasty-looking restaurant
all-you-can-eat buffet
However, convention (a.k.a. tradition, a.k.a. consensus, a.k.a. it’s simply how it’s done, so don’t argue with it) allows for exceptions in some cases in which a misreading is unlikely, as in, say:
real estate agent
high school students
And though you may, now that you’re staring at these constructions, wonder worryingly about the reality of that estate agent or the sobriety of those school students, I’d urge you to stop staring and move on. (Staring at words is always a bad idea. Stare at the word “the” for more than ten seconds and reality begins to recede.)
Generally—yes, exceptions apart, there are always exceptions—one wields a hyphen or hyphens in these before-the-noun (there goes another one) adjectival cases to avoid that momentary unnecessary hesitation we’re always trying to spare our readers.
Consider the difference between, say, “a man eating shark” and “a man-eating shark,” where the hyphen is crucial in clarifying who is eating whom, and “a cat related drama,” which presupposes an articulate cat with a penchant for talking about the theater, and “a cat-related drama,” which is what you meant in the first place.
I recall, for instance, my puzzlement upon encountering this sentence:
Touch averse people who don’t want to be hugged are not rude.
What on earth, I wondered, are “averse people,” and why on earth are you telling me to touch them if they don’t want to be hugged, but wait, what—?
Then the light dawned: People who don’t like to be touched and who resist your attempts to hug them are not rude. Got it.
Now, mind you, this confusion kicked off and resolved itself in seconds. And I assure you, I’m not shamming; you may possibly have read the sentence correctly on your first attempt, but I was flummoxed. Surely, though, the confusion might have been avoided entirely had the sentence simply read:
Touch-averse people who don’t want to be hugged are not rude.
Now, then, as we navigate these migraine-inducing points of trivia, impossible-to-understand differentiations, and inconsistently applied rules, do you wonder why, though I hyphenated “migraine-inducing” and “impossible-to-understand,” I left “inconsistently applied” open?
Because compounds formed from an “-ly” adverb and an adjective or participle do not take a hyphen:
inconsistently applied rules
maddeningly irregular punctuation
beautifully arranged sentences
highly paid copy editors
Why?
Because, we’re told, the possibility of misreading is slim to nil, so a hyphen is unnecessary.
Or, if you prefer a simpler explanation:
Because.*43
53.
Modern style is to merge prefixes and main words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) seamlessly and hyphenlessly, as in:
antiwar
autocorrect
codependent
extracurricular
hyperactive
interdepartmental
intradepartmental
nonnative
outfight
preexisting
pseudointellectual
reelect*44
subpar
unpretentious
I’d suggest that you follow this streamlined style—and I can see some of you gritting your teeth over this already—because to do otherwise will make you look old-fashioned or, worse, rubelike.*45
But: If you find any given hyphenated compound incomprehensible or too hideous to be borne, it’s OK—but choose your battles, please, and make them rare—to hold on to that hyphen.*46
54.
There are some exceptions, though.
Aren’t there always?
To recreate is to enjoy recreation, but to create something anew is to re-create it. And you may reform a naughty child, but if you are taking that child literally apart and putting it back together, you are re-forming it. You may quit your job by resigning, but a contract, once signed, can certainly be re-signed.
55.
As ye prefix, so shall ye suffix. We tend not to think about whether to append a suffix with a hyphen, because we’re quite used not to: -ing (as in “encroaching”), -ism (as in “Darwinism”), -less and -ness (as in “hopelessness”), and all the rest. But if you don’t like the looks of, as above, “rubelike”—is it something to do with Russian money? some sort of insidious cube toy?—I’d simply suggest that you find another, suffixless way to say what you’re trying to say. OK, suffixwise, I think we’re done here.
56.
The age of people’s children trips up a lot of people with children.
My daughter is six years old.
My six-year-old daughter is off to summer camp.
My daughter, a six-year-old, is off to summer camp.
One too often encounters “a six-year old girl” or, though it would be correct in a discussion of infant sextuplets who have just celebrated their first birthday, “six year-olds.”
57.
You might—or might not—be surprised to learn that many copyeditorial man-hours*47 have been expended over the decades as to the correct construction of the common vulgarity—and an enchantingly common vulgarity it is—used to describe an act of fellatio. Is it open, is it hyphenated, is it closed up?
Close it up. Hyphenated vulgarities are comically dainty.
58.
What, did you think I was afraid to type the word “blowjob”?
DASHES
59.
Dashes come in two flavors: em and en. Em dashes (which most people simply refer to as dashes) are so called because they were traditionally the width of a capital M in any particular typeface (nowadays they tend to be a touch wider); en dashes are the width of a lowercase n.
This is an em dash: —
This, just a touch shorter yet still longer than a hyphen, is an en dash: –
Likely you don’t need much advice from me on how to use em dashes, because you all seem to use an awful lot of them.
They’re useful for interruption of dialogue, either midsentence from within:
“Once upon a time—yes, I know you’ve heard this story before—there lived a princess named Snow White.”
or to convey interruption from without:
“The murderer,” she intoned, “is someone in this—”
A shot rang out.
And they nicely set off a bit of text in standard narration when commas—because that bit of text is rather on the parenthetical side, like this one, but one doesn’t want to use parentheses—won’t do the trick:
He packed his bag with all the things he thought he’d need for the weekend—an array of T-shirts, two pairs of socks per day, all the clean underwear he could locate—and made his way to the airport.
According to copyediting tradition—at least copyediting tradition as it was handed down to me—one uses no more than two em dashes in a single sentence, and I think that’s good advice—except when it’s not.
En dashes are the guild secret of copyediting, and most normal people neither use them nor much know what they are nor even know how to type them.*48 I’m happy to reveal the secret.
An en dash is used to hold words together instead of your standard hyphen, which usually does the trick just fine, when one is connecting a multiword proper noun to another multiword proper noun or to pretty much anything else. What the heck does that mean? It means this:
a Meryl Streep–Robert De Niro comedy
a New York–to–Chicago flight
a World War II–era plane
a Pulitzer Prize–winning play
Basically, that which you’re connecting needs a smidgen more connecting than can be accomplished with a hyphen.
Please note in the second example above that I’ve used two en dashes rather than an en dash and a hyphen, even though “Chicago” is a single word. Why? Visual balance, that’s all. This
a New York–to-Chicago flight
simply looks—to me and now, I hope, to you, forever afterward—a bit lopsided.
I’ve also seen attempted, in an attempt to style the last example, the use of multiple hyphens, as in:
a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play
That simply doesn’t look very nice, does it.
You don’t want to make en dashes do too much heavy lifting, though. They work well visually, but they have their limits insofar as meaning is concerned. The likes of
the ex–prime minister
certainly makes sense and follows the rules, but
the former prime minister
works just as well.
And something like
an anti–air pollution committee
would do better to be set as
an anti-air-pollution committee
or perhaps to be rethought altogether.
En dashes are also used for
page references (pp. 3–21)
sporting game scores (the Yankees clobbered the Mets, 14–2)*49
court decisions (the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling by a 7–2 vote)
QUESTION MARKS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS
60.
If—and I’d restrict this bit of advice for more casual prose or the rendering of dialogue—a sentence is constructed like a question but isn’t intended to be one, you might consider concluding it with a period rather than a question mark. “That’s a good idea, don’t you think?” means something quite different from “That’s a horrible idea, isn’t it.”
61.
Go light on the exclamation points. When overused, they’re bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying. Some writers recommend that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points per book; others insist that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points in a lifetime.
62.
That said, it would be irresponsible not to properly convey with an exclamation mark the excitement of such as “Your hair is on fire!” The person with the burning head might otherwise not believe you. And the likes of “What a lovely day!” with a period rather than a bang, as some people like to call the exclamation point, might seem sarcastic. Or depressed.
63.
No one over the age of ten who is not actively engaged in the writing of a comic book should end any sentence with a double exclamation point or double question mark.
64.
We won’t discuss the use of ?! or !? because you’d never do that.*50
65.
Neither will we discuss the interrobang, because we’re all civilized adults here.
66.
Sentences beginning with “I wonder” are not questions—they’re simply pondering declarations—and do not conclude with question marks.
I wonder who’s kissing her now.
I wonder what the king
is doing tonight.
I wonder, wonder who—who-oo-oo-oo—who wrote the book of love.
67.
Neither are sentences beginning with “Guess who” or “Guess what” questions. If anything, they’re imperatives.
Guess who’s coming to dinner.
*1 Not every writer is intent on being immediately comprehensible or in any way consistent, and a good copy editor working with a nascent James Joyce or Gertrude Stein will recognize and honor that. Even under the most regular circumstances, all a copy editor can do is advise; consent or nonconsent is up to the writer.
*2 Whence the double space in the first place? There’s contention and muddle attached to the subject, but here’s an explanation I’ve appropriated from an online chum that covers as well as anything a subject I’m not particularly interested in in the first place: “In hand type and on typewriters, every character is the same width. A period centered in the type block or on a typewriter key thus makes space between it and the preceding letter, requiring an extra space after. Computer fonts have proportional space, and set the period right up against the preceding letter.”
Some older folks I’ve encountered are furiously insistent about the eternal propriety of sentence-dividing double spaces. Likely they also advocate for the retention of the long s, and I wish them much ſucceſs. If you’re a younger person who’s only ever typed on a computer keyboard, odds are good you were not taught the double-space thing, so feel free to slide past this subject altogether with the head-shaking insouciance of your generation.
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