Mastering Punctuation
Enter your revision in the box below each exercise. Click the “+” below each box to see Dr. Hirst’s revision.
Exercise 1
Punctuate correctly, and effectively, with commas:
After working through the year-end assessment we must meet with the stockholders but that won’t be for three weeks.
Our security guards are ever watchful and alert and ready for anything.
The meeting sped along with scintillating reports and analyses and presentations and discussions and motivational messages from the president and all five vice presidents and every departmental head.
Our hydrology group monitors area G which has been radionuclide free. [non-restrictive]
The weir control that was designed for low flow has been repaired. [restrictive]
The weir control which was designed for low flow has been repaired. [non-restrictive]
To calculate the flux from year to year we need complete, and accurate, data.
The supervisor could not make up his mind nor could he for that matter make up an excuse.
Punctuate to speed up:
Aside from last week’s minor, radiation accident, we have had no trouble in the plant, or throughout the entire, International sweep, of installations.
Punctuate to slow down a little (allow reader some “breathing space” in which to absorb ideas):
Staff members in ERP and ESD have helped identify existing monitoring stations on the island but have not selected sites for the new stations nor helped visiting researchers from our sister lab in the Netherlands to assemble and place their equipment.
Punctuate to slow down a lot (increase the sense of “dragging”:
The meeting dragged on with reports and analyses and presentations and discussions and motivational messages from the president and from each of the vice presidents and from every departmental head.
Punctuate to achieve medium emphasis:
First-aid boxes—located as usual to the left of welding stations—must be restocked regularly.
Punctuate to display balance:
It was the best time to invest it was the worst time to invest.
Colons
Use colons to
1. Introduce a list:
We need just three things from you: cooperation, trust, and money.
2. Introduce reasons:
The Oak Ridge Reservation is clearly an excellent choice for consolidation of the nation’s plutonium production: it has an experienced national lab, a very secure facility, an abundant supply of water, and a supportive local community.
If you want to end the sentence with the line naming the Oak Ridge Reservation, for the rhetorical punch gained, you can recast the sentence to make the support (the reasons) precede the claim. You’ll still want a colon:
To consolidate the nation’s plutonium production at one site, we need an experienced national lab, a very secure facility, an abundant supply of water, and a supportive local community: the Oak Ridge Reservation is clearly an excellent choice.
3. Introduce illustrations:
Asthmatic patients can react to any kind of mammal dander: rabbits, for example, can be just as troublesome as cats.
4. Set off headers and notices of various kinds (like this one):
Note: pay close attention to details.
Warning: inattention to punctuation can ruin your style.
Remember: a colon says “namely,” “the following illustrates my point,” “for example,” “as follows,” or “note this.”
Semicolons
Use semicolons to
1. Link two closely related sentences (especially sentences in cause-effect relationship):
Mercury levels in streams are alarmingly high; swift remedial action is needed.
The new digital cameras are the size of a credit card; wallets will soon bulge with them.
The company offered its stock at half price; consumers swarmed to buy it up.
2. Divide a single, long, main clause into readable chunks:
We took photos in the misty byways of London, the seamy underbelly of Paris, and the hot backstreets of Madrid; in the sprawling slums of Buenos Aires, the shivering outskirts of Lima, and the crowded streets of Mexico City; in the waterways of Hong Kong, the gardens of Kyoto, and the mud-bogged streets of Manila.
3. Divide a long sentence made up of multiple independent clauses:
Some species of animals, such as mink and otter, rank high on the scale of social value; other species, such as raccoon and beaver, fall somewhere around the middle of that scale; still other species, such as carp and skunk, nearly fall off the bottom of the scale.
When you have a string of independent clauses like this, it’s always possible simply to come to a full stop (period) at the end of each clause. But sometimes, as in the sample sentence above, you want all the clauses in one sentence: it helps deliver the sense of one idea, one continuous “scale of social value,” on which all animals fall.
Dashes
Use dashes to
1. Create a dramatic pause
The heron flapped in a wobbling ellipse above the belching smokestack and then fell to earth—stone dead.
The investors want to see our phone transcripts and email and memos and maps and sketches and figures and projections—immediately.
2. Add emphasis to a “parenthetical” element
These microchips—etched with the fate of humanity—control our nuclear weapons.
Note: dashes used this way are best regarded as existing on a scale of intensity or stress.
Consider this sequence:
These snail darters (the last of their kind) live only in Tellico River. light stress
These snail darters, the last of their kind, live only in Tellico River.
medium stress
These snail darters—the last of their kind—live only in Tellico River.
heavy stress
These snail darters—the last of their kind!—live only in Tellico River.
very heavy stress
Again, it’s true that you can also indicate levels of intensity by using italics, boldface, capitalization, or font variations of many kinds. Every now and then, it does make sense to take one of those options, especially italics, to create emphasis. But please hear me say “rarely.” Just try, for example, sending to a good journal a piece of writing riddled with boldface, italics, capitalizations, etc. If the editors accept your article, it will come back to you marked up mercilessly, or with a note asking you to please remove all the noise. Yes, this happened to me. Once.
It’s more effective—and more sophisticated—to use traditional punctuation marks. However, if you’re determined to look amateurish, you can do it even with punctuation:
“These snail darters—the last of their kind!!!—live only in Tellico River.”
I’ve illustrated one way to use punctuation for achieving different levels of emphasis, from lightest to heaviest. However, you could work a passage of prose so that the “whisper” of a parenthetical element actually draws attention and therefore “shouts”—in which case, we’d have to rank parentheses as capable of signaling heavy stress. What we’re talking about here is rhetorical effect. Punctuation doesn’t function all by itself in your rhetorical enterprise, of course. But skillful punctuation supports—sometimes, very significantly—your overall stylistic effort.
3. Show interruption or confusion:
“I’ll try to turn off the electricity while you—” YEOW! screamed Fred.
The internal investigators—well, they are not precisely “internal,” since they come from Washington, DC and have power to hire, fire, and completely reorganize any department here at the plant—have made their decision.
We didn’t think—we had never supposed-it didn’t seem possible to consider—that Russian engineers would be so careless with their reactor.
The tiny creatures—were they animals or plants?—moving towards the light—didn’t that mean they were, at least, living things?—but we never found out.
Ellipses
Like dashes, ellipses can help you make your reader pause . . . then receive a following point with greater weight. Consider these sentences:
The incinerator engineers finally found the stored canisters of nerve gas . . . unfortunately, they didn’t find them tightly sealed.
It’s common to deliver some kind of irony or discovery or reversal of expectation after the ellipsis.
How about this sentence:
The sleepy corporal took the man’s ID papers . . . slowly spread them out on his desk, yawning . . . then suddenly popped up and saluted.
The effect I wanted here was an image of this sleepy corporal taking his sweet time, not paying much attention to processing one more person through his checkpoint, and then realizing with a jolt that he was in the presence of a very important person. The ellipsis helps me out. It can be used as a “long dash” to cause the reader to slow way down. This creates a dramatic pause, at the end of which one delivers the punch.
Sure, I could write the “sleepy corporal” sentence using dashes, or even commas or parentheses, in place of the ellipses. But I wouldn’t get quite the timing, and resultant jolt, I’m aiming for. I could also turn that single sentence into three separate sentences:
The sleepy corporal took the man’s ID papers. He slowly spread them out on his desk, yawning. Then he suddenly popped up and saluted.
But this, too, would diminish the effect I desire. The short sentences give my narrative a quickness, an abruptness, that I don’t want until the very end.
Exercise 2
Supply the missing colons, semicolons, dashes, and ellipses; remove the unnecessary ones. Substitute colons, semicolons, dashes, and ellipses for other pieces of punctuation where doing so seems to improve the sentence:
This hydrograph shows a similar trend a general decline in precipitation.
The opportunity opening up in Russia, potentially worth over a billion dollars to our company will not stay open long.
The bank clerk finally returned, carrying the safe deposit box, he opened it and we saw to our amazement that it contained nothing.
The mounting pressure of the river ice, slowly pushing up a glacier-like mound, the high winds, felling telephone poles and huge, ice-coated trees, the alternate snow and freezing rain (cutting down visibility to nearly zero) it was an onslaught of nature for which they were not prepared.
Two countries have agreed to grant us permits; Mexico and Colombia.
The two countries that have agreed to grant us permits, Mexico with its rampant crime and corruption and Colombia with its gangs and terrorists completely out of control are actually the countries hosting the best flora and fauna for our research.
After much hesitation, that is, after seeming to hesitate much, they delivered their verdict, guilty.
Hyphens
Use hyphens not only to divide words at syllable breaks at the ends of lines, but to
1. Fuse compound adjectives (“unit modifiers”):
We sent them a stainless-steel-clad specimen.
Clean out the air-dried, gas-cooled, non-load-bearing frammit.
2. Connect compound words:
mother-in-law
Jack-in-the-Pulpit
3. Signal suspension:
first-, second-, and third-generation farmers
2-, 4-, and 8-meter boards
4. Mark prefixes and (some) suffixes:
all-powerful
quasi-official
self-reliant
shell-like
5. Avoid confusion:
We saw a man eating shark. [Perhaps at a seafood restaurant.]
We saw a man-eating shark. [In the tank at Sea World.]
Parentheses
Use parentheses to
1. Insert non-essential information:
The lab assistant washed the beakers (most of them, anyway) last night.
2. Insert important information in the mode of an aside or “whisper”:
The new Colt .45 Gold Cup is safer (hair trigger and all) than its predecessor.
3. Insert irony or sarcasm:
The competitor’s Butler Robot will lay out a complete dinner set of dishes and glasses
(if it doesn’t smash them all to bits).
4. Intensify something or ask a question:
The high-altitude, high-speed mating habits of the bald eagle (talk about thrilling!) are difficult to study.
Our negotiations with the Japanese (did we forget to bow?) have stalled.
Quotation Marks
Use quotation marks to
1. Attribute text to a speaker:
“Buy every share of ACME you can find!” she ordered.
2. Attribute text to an author:
Fred Thompson, in his book Poison Dart Frogs of the Amazon, writes that “these little frogs are as necessary to some native hunters in the Amazon as bullets are to hunters here in America.”
3. Suggest irony, sarcasm, or coinages:
The company “rightsized” itself into ruin.
4. Mark titles and definitions:
Read chapter 10, “Global Environmental Change.”
Sacre bleu means “sacred blue”-an odd expression from an odd people.
Here’s the rule (American rule) for locating other pieces of punctuation used in the vicinity of quotation marks:
Period and comma always go inside the quotes: “.” “,”
He exercised his “right to remain silent.”
His “right to remain silent,” granted by the Miranda act, is as important as his right to speak.
Colon and semicolon always go outside the quotes: ” “: ” “;
We were soon to know their “well-kept secret”: they were nearly bankrupt.
I read Johnson’s chapter on “Trends in Information Technology”; now I’m convinced that we bought the wrong computer system.
Question mark and exclamation point go either inside or outside the quotes, depending on whether the mark applies to just what’s inside the quotes or to a larger unit:
>Did he get into the business through the “back door”?
She shouted that employees must “Get going or get out!”
Ok; that’s it for reviewing punctuation rules. Those are the most important ones. You’ll have to check out a grammar/mechanics handbook if you want to review use of apostrophes, brackets, braces, slashes, periods, and so on.
Let’s do one final exercise: improving a couple paragraphs that need more effective punctuation. Use the Print Code to separate or join textual elements; to create or reinforce relationships; to reveal structure; to extend or insert elements; to eliminate ambiguity; to speed up or slow down; to emphasize or de-emphasize. Be sure to remove punctuation that seems inappropriate.
Exercise 3
Revise the following paragraphs to improve style. Make no changes except in punctuation.
The proposed Energy Recovery Facilities, burn dumps, have been dumped on by Greenpeace, and the Audubon Society, and Citizens for a Cleaner Tennessee, and a truckload of other organizations, yet the fact remains that this proposal is the best one, to come before our legislature. All the other proposals seem based on three premises; that New York has a bottomless treasury, that we are more afraid of air pollution than of land or water pollution, and that most of us are perfectly willing to expand, or to increase the number of, our existing landfills.
But the proposal we’re now considering describes a way to dispose of our state’s waste which is currently straining our landfills to their limits within budget and without expanding the landfills; expanding the landfills would present its own legal dilemma by the way. It projects the impact on air quality in layman’s terms and a good thing, since none of us here are scientists: and it goes on to project the overall minimal impact on animal life in the state with special attention to the species we most value; humans. Finally it crunches heaps of numbers and demonstrates how the proposed facilities will, in time, become economically self supporting. These Energy Recovery Facilities will in short take care of the landfill crisis which is our most immediate problem, they will work within our current budget, which is an absolute necessity and they will eventually prove to be a positive boon to our area’s economy and to our prospects for reelection.
o A possible revision: The proposed Energy Recovery Facilities (burn dumps) have been “dumped on” by Greenpeace and the Audubon Society and Citizens for a Cleaner Tennessee and a truckload of other organizations-yet the fact remains that this proposal is the best one to come before our legislature. All the other proposals seem based on three premises: that New York has a bottomless treasury; that we are more afraid of air pollution than of land or water pollution; and that most of us are perfectly willing to expand, or to increase the number of, our existing landfills.
But the proposal we’re now considering describes a way to dispose of our state’s waste-which is currently straining our landfills to their limits-within budget and without expanding the landfills (expanding the landfills would present its own legal dilemma, by the way). It projects the impact on air quality in layman’s terms-and a good thing, since none of us here are scientists-and it goes on to project the overall (minimal) impact on animal life in the state, with special attention to the species we most value: humans. Finally, it crunches heaps of numbers and demonstrates how the proposed facilities will in time become economically self-supporting. These Energy Recovery Facilities will, in short, take care of the landfill crisis, which is our most immediate problem; they will work within our current budget, which is an absolute necessity; and they will eventually prove to be a positive boon to our area’s economy . . . and to our prospects for re-election.
Congratulations; you’re on your way to becoming a master punctuator!