Quotes About Punctuation

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.

I still put punctuation in my texts. If it's an 'I', I make sure it's a capital.

Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson's punctuation may be to the way we read her.

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]

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 is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burn-out from all the thankless effort.

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 its." Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant

Using the comma well announces that you have an ear for sense and rhythm, confidence in your style and a proper respect for your reader

On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.

If there is one lesson to be learned from this book, it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation.

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 its." Thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant, even if this means we have double the reason to go and bang our heads against a wall.

Those spineless types who talk about abolishing the apostrophe are missing the point.

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved , incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It's just not cricket.

one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burnout from all the thankless effort.

semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends.

There is even a rather delightful publication for children called The Punctuation Repair Kit, which takes the line Hey! It's uncool to be stupid! - which is a lie, of course, but you have to admire them for trying.

you know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation.

humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes)

So the particular strengths of the colon are beginning to become clear. A colon is nearly always preceded by a complete sentence, and in its simplest usage it rather theatrically announces what is to come. Like a well-trained magician's assistant, it pauses slightly to give you time to get a bit worried, and then efficiently whisks away the cloth and reveals the trick complete.

If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further.

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.

While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time .

is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.

That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

Oh yes, sir. There's no doubt about it, sir. The Punctuation Murderer has struck again.