May/June 2005 | Home

Ask Elaine: Sentence’s Little Helpers

by Elaine Parrish
DMV Copyeditor/EBSTC Senior Member

If you have an editing question you’d like to see addressed in a future column, please submit it to Ask Elaine.

Some writers dislike having to deal with punctuation. Does that sentence require a colon or a semicolon? Should that phrase be set off with dashes or parentheses? When should single quotes be used instead of double? If one exclamation point is good, will several be even better?

Punctuation is too large a topic to be covered in this article. If you’d like to read a witty and amusing book on the subject, I recommend Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Meanwhile, I’ll present here just a few punctuation guidelines (using standard American English conventions).

Purpose

Do not hate punctuation marks. They only want to help guide the reader! The poor little things have no meaning on their own—they are merely accepted conventions whose purpose is to aid clarity by indicating relationships between elements in a piece of writing. Think of punctuation marks as friendly little signposts helping the reader stay on track. Without these signposts, the reader is likely to get lost or misunderstand the meaning.

Degrees of Separation

When you want to provide some kind of separation between two elements in the same sentence, use an em dash, parentheses, or a semicolon. Examples:

• Writing well is an important skill—and an art. The em dash (made by holding down the Alt key and typing 0151 on the keypad) is the most emphatic way to separate two related ideas in the same sentence.
• Writing well is an important skill (and an art). The parentheses indicate that the second idea (art) is less important than the first (skill).
• Writing well is an important skill; it is also an art. The semicolon indicates a strong relationship between two clauses by joining them together into one sentence. Notice that each clause can stand alone. When you use a semicolon, each element must be a complete sentence.

Colons

A colon signals your reader that the material after it is an explanation or illustration of what came before it. Example:

• There are three kinds of people: those who understand math, and those who don’t.

Quote Marks

Use double quote marks around a direct quotation. Example:

• “Time’s fun when you’re having flies,” said Kermit.

Use double quote marks when you want show sarcasm:

• Doing my taxes is my idea of “fun.”

Use single quote marks around a quote within a quote. Example:

• Poe wrote, “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

Periods, Question Marks, and Exclamation Points

Periods do double duty when they are used to end an abbreviation that also ends the sentence. The period is a loner; it doesn’t like to share the end of a sentence with its own kind. So don’t add a period directly after a period. Example:

• I was born and raised in the U.S. The final period serves both to end the abbreviation U.S. and to end the sentence.

On the other hand, periods used to end an abbreviation happily share the end of the sentence with a question mark or exclamation point. Example:

• Were you born and raised in the U.S.?

Question marks and exclamation points should be considered as rare jewels. Use them sparingly so they don’t lose their impact. And, unless you want your serious prose to read like ad copy, don’t use more than one at the end of a sentence, no matter how excited that sentence may be!!!!!! (See what I mean?????)

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