When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.
What the semicolon’s anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world.
Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point.
The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: That’s not writing, it’s typing? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing, and does...
No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked uo on the spot and buried i...
Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every...
I’m sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a family th...
Isn't the analogy with good manners perfect? Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word 'punctilious' ('at...
I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no righ...
I mean, full stops are quite important, aren't they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop...
I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, I should have used fewer semicolons – and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsib...
As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has be...
The Law of Conservation of Apostrophes. A heresy since the 13th century, this law states that a balance exists in nature: For every apostrophe omitted from an it’s, there is an extra one put into an i...
Semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends.
Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected)...
The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. Th...
Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe.
Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe. It is a system of printers' marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium, and if its time has come to...
Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.