Collins Improve Your Punctuation. Graham King
stops and using them to form sentences:
• Keep your sentences variable in length, but generally short.
• Using long sentences doesn’t necessarily make you a good writer.
• To use only full stops is as unnatural as hopping on one leg.
Full Stops and Abbreviations
Full stops have been used traditionally to shorten words, names and phrases. The convention was to use full stops for chopped-off words, or abbreviations:
doz. Sat. Oct. Prof. Staffs. lab. Inst. Fahr.
but not for shortenings consisting of the first and last letters of the word, or contractions:
Mr Dr gdn mfr St yd Revd wmk
Thus, by the rules, per cent. was considered to be an abbreviation because it chopped off the ‘um’ from per centum. And while the Rev. Golightly required a full stop, the Revd Golightly didn’t.
All this, however, has gone by the board because, increasingly and remorselessly, the stops are being abandoned in favour of speed, economy and cleaner typography. You will still see stops used for both abbreviations and contractions (for not everyone knows the difference) and sometimes to avoid ambiguity. Here is a sampling of the new order:
| Formerly | Now (mostly) |
| 6 a.m. | 6 am |
| e.g. | eg |
| 1472 A.D. | 1472 AD |
| Jan. 16 | Jan 16 |
| Wm. Shakespeare | Wm Shakespeare |
| viz. | viz |
| R.S.V.P. | RSVP |
| Capt. Johns, D.F.C. | Capt Johns, DFC |
| U.K. | UK |
Full stops are still required for certain other functional expressions:
• For money units: £6.99, $99.89
• For decimals: 20.86, 33.33%
• For time (hours and minutes): 11.45am, 23.45 hrs
The Common, but Contrary, Comma.
The comma is the most flexible, most versatile of all the punctuation marks. Because it is the least emphatic mark it is also the most subtle and complex. And contrary. Not surprisingly, many writers feel a nagging uncertainty about using commas.
While the full stop brings proceedings to a screeching halt, the comma, with its mortar-like ability to build complex sentences, enlarges upon thoughts, joins them to further thoughts and afterthoughts, binds in extra information, and generally has a good time. A writer with full command of the comma can have a ball. Here’s the English humourist and columnist Alan Coren displaying an enviable skill in a passage in which the commas are like the carefully placed hoofprints of a horse lining up for a jump, and then – a long soaring comma-less passage follows before the full stop landing!
Until I was 40, I was utterly urban, uneasy in any surroundings more arborious than a sparsely tubbed patio, and knowing no more of wildlife than that a starling was probably taller than a stoat. As for the horse, I regarded it primarily as something to watch out for in French casseroles. But 40 is a critical age, a time for last-ditch stands, so I bought that last ditch in the New Forest, and the hovel that leaned over it, and enough land for the kids to run about and get tetanus in, somewhere, in short, which would allow me to escape into that sweet Arcadia where deer eat the rockery and mice eat the roof and ponies eat the hedges and a man can be snug in his nocturnal cot and hear naught but the soporific sound of death-watch beetles laughing at the inadequacy of creosote.
Now that, to a comma freak, is about as good as you’ll find anywhere in the language. Note, too, that Coren even gets away with a comma (after get tetanus in, … ) where ordinary grammatically correct mortals would have placed a semicolon.
But back to earth. Perhaps the most resilient myth about commas is that they indicate natural breath pauses. There was a lot of truth in this, as we have seen, when the language was more orally inclined, but today commas have all but succumbed to grammatical logic.
Every year over the British Isles, half a million meteorites enter the atmosphere.
You can hear the speaker intoning this, can’t you – with a dramatic pause before announcing the impressive statistic half a million. Try it. But when you write it down as a sentence you find that the comma is redundant:
Every year over the British Isles half a million meteorites enter the atmosphere.
Most writing today demands that commas be logical, but if you are a novelist, reporting a character’s speech, you would be correct to use what are called ‘rhetorical commas’ when the character takes a breath.
Contemporary writing is far less rambling and rhetorical than it was in Dickens’ day. Here’s a not untypical sentence from Martin Chuzzlewit:
Then there was George Chuzzlewit, a gay bachelor cousin, who claimed to be young, but had been younger, and was inclined to corpulency, and rather overfed himself – to the extent, indeed, that his eyes were strained in their sockets, as if with constant surprise; and he had such an obvious disposition to pimples, that the bright spots on his cravat, the rich pattern on his waistcoat, and even his glittering trinkets, seemed to have broken out on him, and not to have come into existence comfortably.
Tot up the commas – twelve in all, plus a dash and a semicolon. If you were disposed to attempt such a sentence today you would probably use only five commas, six at most. Whether it would retain the magic, though, is another matter. Try it.
Too, many, commas …
The over-use of commas still survives in sentences wrought by writers, possibly Librans, who can’t make their minds up. Their sentences tend to be hedged with ifs, buts, maybes and pontifications:
It is, curiously, surprising when, say, you hear your name announced in a foreign language, or even in a foreign accent.
Here’s another example, from The Times a few years ago:
It is, however, already plain enough that, unless, indeed, some great catastrophe should upset all their calculations …
It’s grammatical, but a real pain to the reader. In most cases such sentences can be written with half the number of commas or less. Here’s an over-spiced sentence which can be rewritten without any commas at all:
He had not, previously, met the plaintiff, except when, in 1984, he had, unexpectedly, found himself in Paris.
Those are bad cases of what the Fowler brothers, in The King’s English, called ‘spot plague’ and fortunately, perhaps through the influence of newspaper brevity and the crispness of much modern fiction, they’re a dying breed. But the injection of the single comma into a perfectly good sentence, simply because a writer feels it is lonely without one, is a growth industry:
• The trophy presented to the winner, was the one donated by the village butcher.
• The gang left him, bleeding by the roadside.
• You can never foretell, what the weather will be like.
Before we get too glib about unnecessary commas, here’s a well-comma’d, heavily parenthesised sentence written by a craftsman, detective story writer Julian Symons. In this case you will find it rather difficult to remove any of the commas without causing confusion or disturbing the flow: