Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

by Lynne Truss

  1 titles of books, newspapers, albums, films such as (unfortunately) Who Framed Roger Rabbit

  2 emphasis of certain words

  3 foreign words and phrases

  4 examples when writing about language

  We even accept the mad white-on-black convention that when a whole sentence is in italics, you use roman type to emphasise a key word inside it. Some British newspapers, notably The Guardian, have dropped the use of italics for titles, which as far as I can see makes life a lot more difficult for the reader without any compensating benefits. Like the exclamation mark, however, italics should be used sparingly for the purposes of emphasis – partly because they are a confession of stylistic failure, and partly because readers glancing at a page of type might unconsciously clock the italicised bit before starting their proper work of beginning in the top left-hand corner. Martin Amis, reviewing Iris Murdoch’s novel The Philosopher’s Pupil in The Observer in 1983, complained of a narrator, “N”, who was irritating on a variety of scores, and explains what can happen to a writer who uses italics too much:

  Apart from a weakness for quotation marks, “N” also has a weakness for ellipses, dashes, exclamations and italics, especially italics. Each page is corrugated by half a dozen underlinings, normally a sure sign of stylistic irresolution. A jangled, surreal (and much shorter) version of the book could be obtained by reading the italic type and omitting the roman. It would go something like this:

  deep, significant, awful, horrid, sickening, absolutely disgusting, guilt, accuse, secret, conspiracy, go to the cinema, go for a long walk, an entirely different matter, an entirely new way, become a historian, become a philosopher, never sing again, Stella, jealous, happy, cad, bloody fool, God, Christ, mad, crazy …

  Martin Amis, collected in

  The War Against Cliché, 2001

  What a rotten thing to do. But on the other hand, I feel he has saved us all the bother of reading the book now.

  When Amis fils mentioned quotation marks as an annoyance in The Philosopher’s Pupil, he was not objecting to those that indicate actual quotations. Inverted commas (or speech marks, or quotes) are sometimes used by fastidious writers as a kind of linguistic rubber glove, distancing them from vulgar words or clichés they are too refined to use in the normal way. This “N” character in Iris Murdoch’s novel evidently can’t bring himself to say “keep in touch” without sealing it hygienically within inverted commas, and doubtless additionally indicating his irony with two pairs of curled fingers held up at either side of his face. In newspapers, similar inverted commas are sometimes known as “scare quotes”, as when a headline says “BRITAIN BUYS ‘WRONG’ VACCINE”, “ROBERT MAXWELL ‘DEAD’”, or “DEAD MAN ‘EATEN’ IN GRUESOME CAT HORROR”. Such inverted commas (usually single, rather than double) are understood by readers to mean that there is some authority for this story, perhaps even a quotable source, but that the newspaper itself won’t yet state it as fact. Evidently there is no legal protection provided by such weaselly inverted commas: if you assert someone is ‘LYING’, it’s pretty much the same in law as saying he is lying. And we all know the dead man was definitely eaten by those gruesome cats – otherwise no one would have raised the possibility. The interesting thing is how this practice relates to the advertising of ‘PIZZAS’ in quite large supermarket chains. To those of us accustomed to newspaper headlines, ‘PIZZAS’ in inverted commas suggests these might be pizzas, but nobody’s promising anything, and if they turn out to be cardboard with a bit of cheese on top, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

  There is a huge amount of ignorance concerning the use of quotation marks. A catalogue will advertise that its pineapple ring slicer works just like ‘a compass’. Why? Why doesn’t it work just like a compass? There is a serious cognitive problem highlighted here, I think; a real misunderstanding of what writing is. Nigel Hall, a reader in literacy education at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the way children learn to punctuate, told me about one small boy who peppered his work with quotation marks, regardless of whether it was reporting any speech. Why did he do that? “Because it’s all me talking,” the child explained, and I imagine it was hard to argue against such immaculate logic. It seems to me that the ‘PIZZAS’ people, who put signs in their windows – ‘NOW OPEN SUNDAYS’, ‘THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING’ – have the same problem as this little boy. If they are saying this thing, announcing it, then they feel that logically they have to present it in speech marks, because it’s all them talking.

  Comfortable though we are with our modern usage, it has taken a long time to evolve, and will of course evolve further, so we mustn’t get complacent. Until the beginning of the 18th century, quotation marks were used in England only to call attention to sententious remarks. Then in 1714 someone had the idea of using them to denote direct speech, and by the time of the first edition of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones in 1749, inverted commas were used by printers both to contain the speech and to indicate in a general, left-hand marginal way that there was speech going on.

  Here the Book dropt from her Hand,

  and a Shower of Tears ran down into her

  Bosom. In this Situation she had continued

  a Minute, when the Door opened, and in

  came Lord Fellamar. Sophia started from

  her Chair at his Entrance ; and his Lordship advancing forwards, and making a

  low Bow said, ‘ I am afraid, Miss Wes-‘

  tern, I break in upon you abruptly.’ ‘ In-

  ‘ deed, my Lord,’ says she, ‘ I must own

  ‘ myself a little surprized at this unexpect-

  ‘ ed Visit.’ ‘ If this Visit be unexpected,

  ‘ Madam,’ answered Lord Fellamar, ‘ my

  ‘ Eyes must have been very faithless Inter-

  ‘ preters of my Heart …’

  Since the 18th century we have standardised the use of quotation marks – but only up to a point. Readers are obliged to get used to the idea from an early age that “Double or single?” is a question not applicable only to beds, tennis and cream. We see both double and single quotation marks every day, assimilate both, and try not to think about it. Having been trained to use double quotation marks for speech, however, with single quotations for quotations-within-quotations, I grieve to see the rule applied the other way round. There is a difference between saying someone is “out of sorts” (a direct quote) and ‘out of sorts’ (i.e., not feeling very well): when single quotes serve both functions, you lose this distinction. Also, with the poor apostrophe already confusing people so much, a sentence that begins with a single quote and contains an apostrophe after three or four words is quite confusing typographically, because you automatically assume the apostrophe is the closing quotation mark:

  ‘I was at St Thomas’ Hospital,’ she said.

  There is, too, a gulf between American usage and our own, with Americans always using double quotation marks and American grammarians insisting that, if a sentence ends with a phrase in inverted commas, all the terminal punctuation for the sentence must come tidily inside the speech marks, even when this doesn’t seem to make sense.

  Sophia asked Lord Fellamar if he was “out of his senses”. (British)

  Sophia asked Lord Fellamar if he was “out of his senses.” (American)

  Since where and when to put other punctuation in direct speech is a real bother to some people, here are some basic rules:

  When a piece of dialogue is attributed at its end, conclude it with a comma inside the inverted commas:

  “You are out of your senses, Lord Fellamar,” gasped Sophia.

  When the dialogue is attributed at the start, conclude with a full stop inside the inverted commas:

  Lord Fellamar replied, “Love has so totally deprived me of reason that I am scarce accountable for my actions.”

  When the dialogue stands on its own, the full stop comes inside the inverted commas:

  “Upon my word, my Lord, I neither understand your words nor
your behaviour.”

  When only a fragment of speech is being quoted, put punctuation outside the inverted commas:

  Sophia recognised in Lord Fellamar the “effects of frenzy”, and tried to break away.

  When the quotation is a question or exclamation, the terminal marks come inside the inverted commas:

  “Am I really to conceive your Lordship to be out of his senses?” cried Sophia. “Unhand me, sir!” she demanded.

  But when the question is posed by the sentence rather than by the speaker, logic demands that the question mark goes outside the inverted commas:

  Why didn’t Sophia see at once that his lordship doted on her “to the highest degree of distraction”?

  Where the quoted speech is a full sentence requiring a full stop (or other terminal mark) of its own, and coincidentally comes at the end of the containing sentence, the mark inside the inverted commas serves for both:

  Then fetching a deep sigh […] he ran on for some minutes in a strain which would be little more pleasing to the reader than it was to the lady; and at last concluded with a declaration, “That if he was master of the world, he would lay it at her feet.”

  The basic rule is straightforward and logical: when the punctuation relates to the quoted words it goes inside the inverted commas; when it relates to the sentence, it goes outside. Unless, of course, you are in America.

  So far in this chapter we have looked at punctuation that encourages the reader to inflect words mentally in a straightforwardly emphatic way:

  Hello!

  Hello?

  Hello

  “Hello”

  But, as many classically trained actors will tell you, it can be just as effective to lower your voice for emphasis as to raise it. Poets and writers know this too, which is where dashes and brackets come in. Both of these marks ostensibly muffle your volume and flatten your tone; but, used carefully, they can do more to make a point than any page and a half of italics. Here are some literary dashes:

  He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery,

  And how to scale a fortress – or a nunnery.

  Byron, Don Juan, 1818-20

  Let love therefore be what it will, – my uncle Toby fell into it.

  Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1760-67

  Because I could not stop for Death –

  He kindly stopped for me –

  The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

  And Immortality.

  Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death”, 1863

  The dash is nowadays seen as the enemy of grammar, partly because overtly disorganised thought is the mode of most email and (mobile phone) text communication, and the dash does an annoyingly good job in these contexts standing in for all other punctuation marks. “I saw Jim – he looked gr8 – have you seen him – what time is the thing imorrow – C U there.” Why is the dash the mark à la mode? Because it is so easy to use, perhaps; and because it is hard to use wrongly; but also because it is, simply, easy to see. Full stops and commas are often quite tiny in modern typefaces, whereas the handsome horizontal dash is a lot harder to miss. However, just as the exclamation mark used to be persona non grata on old typewriter keyboards, so you may often hunt in vain for the dash nowadays: on my own Apple keyboard I have been for years discouraged from any stream-of-consciousness writing by the belief that I had to make my own quasi-dashes from illicit double-taps on the hyphen. When I discovered a week ago that I could make a true dash by employing the alt key with the hyphen, it was truly one of the red-letter days of my life. Meanwhile, the distinction between the big bold dash and its little brother the hyphen is evidently blurring these days, and requires explanation. Whereas a dash is generally concerned to connect (or separate) phrases and sentences, the tiny tricksy hyphen (used above in such phrases as “quasi-dashes”, “double-taps” and “stream-of-consciousness”) is used quite distinctly to connect (or separate) individual words.

  Are dashes intrinsically unserious? Certainly in abundance they suggest baroque and hyperactive silliness, as exemplified by the breathless Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s Emma:

  “How do you do? How do you all do? – Quite well, I am much obliged to you. Never better. – Don’t I hear another carriage? – Who can this be? – very likely the worthy Coles. – Upon my word, this is charming to be standing about among such friends! And such a noble fire! – I am quite roasted.”

  Yet the dash need not be silly. The word has identical roots with the verb “to dash” (deriving from the Middle English verb dasshen, meaning “to knock, to hurl, to break”) and the point is that a single dash creates a dramatic disjunction which can be exploited for humour, for bathos, for shock. “Wait for it,” the single dash seems to whisper, with a twinkle if you’re lucky. Byron is a great master of the dramatic dash:

  A little still she strove, and much repented, And whispering “I will ne’er consent” –

  consented.

  A comma just wouldn’t cut the mustard there, especially with the metre hurrying you along. Meanwhile, Emily Dickinson’s extraordinary penchant for dashes has been said to be a mirror into her own synapses, symbolising “the analogical leaps and flashes of advanced cognition” – either that, of course, or she used a typewriter from which all the other punctuation keys had been sadistically removed.

  Double dashes are another matter. These are a bracketing device, and the only issue is when to use brackets, when dashes. The differences can be quite subtle, but compare these two:

  He was (I still can’t believe this!) trying to climb in the window.

  He was – I still can’t believe this! – trying to climb in the window.

  Is one version preferable to the other? Reading both aloud, it would be hard to tell them apart. But as they sit on the page, it seems to me that the brackets half-remove the intruding aside, half-suppress it; while the dashes warmly welcome it in, with open arms.

  Brackets come in various shapes, types and names:

  1 round brackets (which we call brackets, and the Americans call parentheses)

  2 square brackets [which we call square brackets, and the Americans call brackets]

  3 brace brackets {which are shaped thus and derive from maths}

  4 angle brackets < used in palaeography, linguistics and other technical specialisms >

  The angle shape was the earliest to appear, but in the 16th century Erasmus gave the attractive name “lunulae” to round brackets, in reference to their moon-like profile. The word “bracket” – one of the few English punctuation words not to derive from Greek or Latin – comes from the same German root as “brace” and “breeches”, and originally referred (deep down you knew this) to the kind of bracket that holds up a bookshelf! The idea that, in writing, brackets lift up a section of a sentence, holding it a foot or two above the rest, is rather satisfying. For the reader, however, the important thing is that this lift-and-hold business doesn’t last too long, because there is a certain amount of anxiety created once a bracket has been opened that is not dissipated until it’s bloody well closed again. As Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked so beautifully, “One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.” Writers who place whole substantive passages in brackets can’t possibly appreciate the existential suffering they inflict. When a bracket opens halfway down a left-hand page and the closing bracket is, giddyingly, nowhere in sight, it’s like being in a play by Jean-Paul Sartre.

  However, there are plenty of legitimate uses of brackets. First, to add information, to clarify, to explain, to illustrate:

  Tom Jones (1749) was considered such a lewd book that, when two earthquakes occurred in London in 1750, Fielding’s book was blamed for them.

  Starburst (formerly known as Opal Fruits) are available in all corner shops.

  Robert Maxwell wasn’t dead yet (he was still suing people).

  Second, brackets are perfect for authorial asides of various kinds:

  The exclam
ation mark is sometimes called (really!) a dog’s cock.

  Tom Jones was blamed for some earthquakes (isn’t that interesting?).

  Square brackets are quite another thing. They are an editor’s way of clarifying the meaning of a direct quote without actually changing any of the words:

  She had used it [Tom Jones] for quite a number of examples now.

  Obviously, the text only says “it” at this point, but the editor needs to be more specific, so inserts the information inside square brackets. It is quite all right to replace the “it”, actually:

  She had used [Tom Jones] for far too many examples by this stage.

  Square brackets are most commonly used around the word sic (from the Latin sicut, meaning “just as”), to explain the status of an apparent mistake. Generally, sic means the foregoing mistake (or apparent mistake) was made by the writer/speaker I am quoting; I am but the faithful messenger; in fact I never get anything wrong myself:

  She asked for “a packet of Starbust [sic]”.

  Book reviewers in particular adore to use sic. It makes them feel terrific, because what it means is that they’ve spotted this apparent mistake, thank you, so there is no point writing in. However, there are distinctions within sic: it can signify two different things:

  1 This isn’t a mistake, actually; it just looks like one to the casual eye.

  I am grateful to Mrs Bollock [sic] for the following examples.

  2 Tee hee, what a dreadful error! But it would be dishonest of me to correct it.

  “Please send a copy of The Time’s [sic],” he wrote.

  Square brackets also (sometimes) enclose the ellipsis, when words are left out. Thus:

  But a more lucky circumstance happened to poor Sophia: another noise broke forth, which almost drowned her cries [ … ] the door flew open, and in came Squire Western, with his parson, and a set of myrmidons at his heels.