(7) The use of commas before a clause beginning with that. A comma was at one time always used in this position:
It is a just though trite observation, that victorious Rome was herself subdued by the arts of Greece. (Gibbon, 1776)
… the true meaning is so uncertain and remote, that it is never sought, because it cannot be known when it is found. (Dr Johnson, 1781)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (Jane Austen, 1813)
We are more sparing of commas nowadays, and this practice has gone out of fashion. In his book of 1939, Mind the Stop, Mr G. V. Carey goes so far as to write, ‘it is probably true to say that immediately before the conjunction “that” a comma will be admissible more rarely than before any other con-junction’.
B. Uses of commas that need special care
If we turn from uses of the comma generally regarded as incorrect to those generally regarded as legitimate, we find one or two that need special care.
(1) The use of commas with adverbs and adverbial phrases.
(a) At the beginning of sentences.
In their absence, it will be desirable …
Nevertheless, there is need for special care …
In practice, it has been found advisable …
Some writers put a comma here as a matter of course. But others do it only if a comma is needed to emphasise a contrast or to prevent a reader from going off on a wrong scent, as in:
A few days after, the Minister of Labour promised that a dossier of the strike would be published.
Two miles on, the road is worse.
On the principle that stops should not be used unless they are needed, this discrimination is to be commended.
(b) Within sentences. To enclose an adverb in commas is, as we have seen, a legitimate and useful way of emphasising it. ‘All these things may, eventually, come to pass’ is another way of saying ‘All these things may come to pass—eventually’. Or it may serve to emphasise the subject of the sentence: ‘He, perhaps, thought differently’. The commas underline he. But certain common adverbs such as therefore, however, perhaps, of course, present difficulties because of a convention that they should always be enclosed in commas, whether emphasised or not. This is dangerous. The only safe course is to treat the question as one not of rule but of common sense, and to judge each case on its merits. Lord Dunsany, in his Donnellan Lectures, blames printers for this convention:
The writer puts down ‘I am going to Dublin perhaps, with Murphy’. Or he writes ‘I am going to Dublin, perhaps with Murphy’. But in either case these pestilent commas swoop down, not from his pen, but from the darker parts of the cornices where they were bred in the printer’s office, and will alight on either side of the word perhaps, making it impossible for the reader to know the writer’s meaning, making it impossible to see whether the doubt implied by the word perhaps affected Dublin or Murphy. I will quote an actual case I saw in a newspaper. A naval officer was giving evidence before a court, and said, ‘I decided on an alteration of course’. But since the words ‘of course’ must always be surrounded by commas, the printer’s commas came down on them … and the sentence read, ‘I decided upon an alteration, of course’!
The adverb however is especially likely to stand in need of clarifying commas. For instance, Burke, in 1791, wrote:
The author is compelled, however reluctantly, to receive the sentence pronounced upon him in the House of Commons as that of the party.
The meaning of this sentence would be different if the comma after ‘reluctantly’ were omitted, and one inserted after ‘however’:
The author is compelled, however, reluctantly to receive the sentence pronounced upon him …
(2) The ‘throwback’ comma. A common use of the comma as a clarifier is to show that what follows it refers not to what immediately precedes it but to something further back. William Cobbett, in the grammar that he wrote for his young son, pointed out that ‘you will be rich if you be industrious, in a few years’ did not mean the same as ‘you will be rich, if you be industrious in a few years’. He added:
The first sentence means, that you will, in a few years’ time, be rich, if you be industrious now. The second means, that you will be rich, some time or other, if you be industrious in a few years from this time.
In the first sentence the comma that precedes the adverbial phrase ‘in a few years’ is a clumsy device. The proper way of writing this sentence is ‘you will be rich in a few years if you be industrious’. If words are arranged in the right order these artificial aids will rarely be necessary.*
(3) Commas in series.
(a) Nouns and phrases. Below is a list of nouns:
The company included ambassadors, ministers, bishops and judges.
In a sentence such as this one commas are always put after each item in the series up to the last but one, but practice varies about putting a comma between the last but one, and the and introducing the last: ‘ministers, bishops, and judges’. Those who favour a comma there (a minority, but gaining ground) argue that, as a comma may sometimes be necessary to prevent ambiguity, there had better be one there always. Suppose the sentence were this:
The company included the bishops of Winchester, Salisbury, Bristol, and Bath and Wells.
The reader unversed in the English ecclesiastical hierarchy needs the comma after ‘Bristol’ in order to sort out the last two bishops. Without it they might be, grammatically and geographically, either (i) Bristol and Bath and (ii) Wells, or (i) Bristol and (ii) Bath and Wells. Ambiguity cannot be justified by saying that those who are interested will know what is meant and those who are not will not care.
(b) Adjectives. Where the series is of adjectives preceding a noun, it is a matter of taste whether there are commas between them or not. Both of these are correct:
A silly verbose pompous letter.
A silly, verbose, pompous letter.
The commas merely give a little emphasis to the adjectives. Where the final adjective is one that describes the species of the noun, it is regarded as part of the noun, and is not preceded by a comma. Thus:
A silly, verbose, pompous official letter.
DASH
The dash is seductive, tempting writers to use it as a punctuation-maid-of-all-work that saves them the trouble of choosing the right stop. We all know letter-writers who carry this habit to the length of relying on one punctuation mark only—a nondescript symbol that might be a dash or might be something else. Moreover the dash lends itself easily to rhetorical uses that may be out of place in humdrum prose. Perhaps that is why I have been tempted to go to Sir Winston Churchill’s war speeches for examples of its recognised uses.
(1) In pairs for parenthesis:
no future generation of English-speaking folks—for that is the tribunal to which we appeal—will doubt that, even at a great cost to ourselves in technical preparation, we were guiltless of the bloodshed, terror and misery which have engulfed so many lands …
(2) To introduce an explanation, amplification, paraphrase, particularisation or correction of what immediately precedes it:
They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril …
… overhead the far-ranging Catalina air-boats soared—vigilant, protecting eagles in the sky.
… the end of our financial resources was in sight—nay, had actually been reached.
(3) To indicate that the construction of the sentence, as begun, will be left unfinished (grammarians call this anacoluthon):
But when you go to other countries—oddly enough I saw a message from the authorities who are most concerned with our Arab problem at present, urging that we should be careful not to indulge in too gloomy forecasts.
(4) To gather up the subject of a sentence when it is a very long one; after the long loose canter of the subjec
t you need to collect your horse for the jump to the verb:
The formidable power of Nazi Germany, the vast mass of destructive munitions that they have made or captured, the courage, skill and audacity of their striking forces, the ruthlessness of their centralised war-direction, the prostrate condition of so many great peoples under their yoke, the resources of so many lands which may to some extent become available to them—all these restrain rejoicing and forbid the slightest relaxation.
Similarly with the jump from the verb:
I would say generally that we must regard all these victims of the Nazi executioners in so many lands, who are labelled Communists and Jews—we must regard them just as if they were brave soldiers who die for their country on the field of battle.
(5) To introduce a paradoxical, humorous or whimsical ending to a sentence:
He makes mistakes, as I do, though not so many or so serious—he has not the same opportunities.
FULL STOP
The full stop is an exception to the rule that ‘as few stops should be used as will do the work’. I have no advice to give about it except to say that it should be plentifully used: in other words, to repeat the advice I have already given that sentences should be short. I am not, of course, suggesting that good prose never contains long ones. On the contrary, the best prose is a judicious admixture of the long with the short. Mark Twain, in 1890, after advising the young author to write short sentences as a rule, added:
At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure that there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he is done with it, it won’t be a sea-serpent, with half its arches under the water, it will be a torchlight procession.
If you can write long sentences that you are satisfied really merit that description, by all means surprise and delight your readers with one occasionally. But the shorter ones are safer.*
Always use a full stop to separate into two sentences statements between which there is no true continuity of thought. For example, and is too close a link in these sentences:
There are 630 boys in the school and the term will end on April 1st.
As regards Mr Smith’s case a report was made on papers AB 340 and I understand he is now dead.
HYPHEN
In Modern English Usage Fowler makes an elaborate study of the hyphen. He begins engagingly by pointing out that ‘a superfluous hair-remover’ can only mean a hair-remover that nobody wants, and he proceeds to work out a code of rules for the proper use of the hyphen. He admits that the result of following his rules ‘will often differ from current usage’. But, he adds, ‘that usage is so variable as to be better named caprice’. In a style book of 1937 produced for the Oxford University Press, Manuscript & Proof, John Benbow strikes a similar note when he writes of a ‘great twilight zone’ in the use of hyphens, and says, ‘If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad’.
I have no intention of taking hyphens seriously. Those who wish to do so I leave to Fowler’s eleven columns. If I attempted to lay down any rules I should certainly go astray, and give advice not seemly to be followed. I will attempt no more than to give a few elementary warnings.
(1) Do not use hyphens unnecessarily. If, for instance, you must use overall as an adjective (though this is not recommended) write it like that, and not over-all. You need a hyphen to avoid puzzling your reader whether coop is something to put a hen in, or a profit-sharing association (co-op); but the word cooperative can be understood without, and is often written this way. Where you do split a word with a hyphen, make sure you split it at the main break.
(2) To prevent ambiguity a hyphen should be used in a compound adjective (e.g. first-class, six-inch, copper-coloured). The omission of a hyphen between ‘government’ and ‘financed’ in the following sentence throws the reader on to a false scent:
When government financed projects in the development areas have been grouped …
But remember that words forming parts of compound adjectives when they precede a noun may stand on their own feet when they follow it, and then they need not be hyphenated. A ‘second-hand car’ needs a hyphen, but ‘the car was second hand’ does not. There must be hyphens in ‘the balance-of-payment difficulties’ but not in ‘the difficulties are over the balance of payments’.
Note. Gowers’s advice here is not wrong, but nowadays many writers will do without the hyphen in a compound adjective before a noun if the resulting sentence remains unambiguous (‘When I went to the station to buy a first class ticket there was a tin pot dictator managing the queue’). If this is your habit, you must stay alert to the possibility of a misunderstanding. The idea was recently mooted that when universities weighed up applicants for places, pupils from ‘low-performing schools’ should be given an advantage over pupils from better schools. For want of a hyphen, one newspaper produced the following absurd account of the proposal: ‘Exam board suggested awarding bonus points to low-performing school students who get top grades’.
NB when adverbs that end in ly are used in descriptive compounds, they do not need a hyphen (‘a strongly worded complaint’; ‘a densely argued report’). ~
(3) Avoid as far as possible the practice of separating a pair of hyphenated words, leaving a hyphen in mid-air. To do this is to misuse the hyphen (whose proper function is to link a word with its immediate neighbour) and it has a slovenly look. The saving of one word cannot justify writing ‘where chaplains (whole- or part-time) have been appointed’. This should be, ‘where chaplains have been appointed, whole-time or part-time’.
INVERTED COMMAS
I have read nothing more sensible about inverted commas than this:
It is remarkable in an age peculiarly contemptuous of punctuation marks that we have not yet had the courage to abolish inverted commas … After all, they are a modern invention. The Bible is plain enough without them; and so is the literature of the eighteenth century. Bernard Shaw scorns them. However, since they are with us, we must do our best with them, always trying to reduce them to a minimum. (H. A. Treble and G. H. Vallins, An ABC of English Usage)
I have only two other things to say on this vexatious topic.
The first question is whether punctuation marks (including question and exclamation marks) should come before or after the inverted commas that close a quotation. This has been much argued, with no conclusive result. It does not seem to me of great practical importance, but I feel bound to refer to it, if only because a correspondent criticised me for giving no guidance on the matter in an earlier edition of this book, and accused me of being manifestly shaky about it myself. The truth is that there is no settled practice governing this most complicated subject. Pages were written about it by the Fowlers in The King’s English, but their conclusions are by no means universally accepted.
Most books on English advise that stops should be put in their logical positions. But what does that mean? There are two schools of thought. The first is exemplified, perhaps shakily, in this book, and is summarised below. Let us take this as our quotation:
I guarantee that the parcel will be delivered, and on time.
If this is quoted as a free-standing sentence, its own stops remain inside the inverted commas:
‘I guarantee’, he wrote, ‘that the parcel will be delivered,’ adding emphatically, ‘and on time.’
But if it is quoted as part of a longer sentence that embraces it, and the two end together with the same stop, the stop goes outside:
He wrote: ‘I guarantee that the parcel will be delivered, and on time’.
This applies even to a question mark:
How could he possibly write afterwards, ‘Why did you believe my guarantee’?
But if the two stops are different, a question mark trumps a full stop:
How could he possibly write afterwards, ‘I meant every word of it’?
He dared to write afterwards, ‘Why did you believe my guarantee?’
The second s
chool of thought will not have this. Its adherents, including many publishers, dislike the look of stops outside inverted commas if they can possibly be put inside. But we need not concern ourselves here with questions of taste in printing. The drafter of official letters and memoranda is advised to stick to the principle of placing the punctuation marks according to the sense.*
The second thing I have to say on this topic is a repeat of my earlier warning against over-indulgence in the trick of encasing words or phrases in inverted commas to indicate that they are being used in a slang or technical or facetious or some other unusual sense. This is a useful occasional device; instances may be found in this book. But it is a dangerous habit.
Note. Many people would no doubt still agree with Gowers that inverted commas can be taken to indicate a facetious or an unusual sense. But anyone in this camp is at risk of being disconcerted by the numerous other people who now use inverted commas merely for emphasis. The danger is illustrated by an article on ‘the metrics of recruiting’:
With the role of human resources shifting from service and administration to strategic planning partner, we need to take on more accountability for how we impact the success of the business. The biggest impact we can make is on the ‘human’ resources the organization employs to maintain the business.
The phrase human resources is used here first to refer to the specialists who manage an entire workforce, and second, to the workers themselves. In the second instance, in an attempt to emphasise that the resources to be ‘impacted’ are of the living, breathing kind, the word human has been put in inverted commas. Yet the effect on those who read inverted commas to mean ‘please note that I am using this word facetiously’ will be the reverse of the one intended: to them it must seem that the workers are being dismissed—in an offensively conspiratorial manner—as somehow less than human. (Either way, the meaning of the second sentence appears to amount to little more than ‘In order to do our job we should do our job’.) ~
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