Now, how shall I start this review?
‘I loved this book. I really did. (Too abrupt.)’
‘I loved this book, I really did. (Too rushed.)’
‘I loved this book: I really did. (Too planned.)’
‘I loved this book — I really did. (Too afterthoughty.)’
‘I loved this book… I really did. (Too uncertain.)’
‘I loved this book; I really did.’
Ah, that’s more like it. The semicolon gives me the best of both worlds. It helps me pause, and have a think, and yet pushes me forward to what I want to say next. It separates and unites simultaneously. It does a job that no other punctuation mark does. And the way to see this is to develop a sense of the contrast. What happens if we punctuate a sentence differently?
This isn’t something that can be summed up in a simple rule, and those who have tried over the past 200 years to find rules governing punctuation have failed miserably, as Cecelia Watson shows in the opening chapters of her insightful book. Punctuation tries to capture two incompatible drives: the desire to mark grammatical structure, and the desire to express the dynamic of the speaking voice. The tension between them means that no two people share exactly the same set of preferences. That’s easy to demonstrate. Give a group an unpunctuated page and ask them to mark it up, and you’d be lucky to find two who would do it in exactly the same way.
Read Full Article »
