punctuation - Steven R. Southard (Poseidon's Scribe)

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Breaking Punctuation Rules

Recently, in a meeting with my critique group, I criticized an author for using too many em-dashes (—) in a manuscript. This author then acquainted me with an interesting online disagreement.

First, author Kate Dyer-Seeley posted a well-worded defense of the Oxford Comma. I, too, am a fan of inserting a comma after the penultimate item in a list before the ‘and.’

Then, author Kristine Kathryn Rusch (who had once been Dyer-Seely’s instructor) countered with a post of her own. Her objection didn’t concern the Oxford Comma, but rather Dyer-Seely’s willingness to add or delete commas from her manuscripts based on an editor’s suggestions.

For Rusch, punctuation is a tool employed in the service of the story, and useful for conveying an author’s voice. Therefore, if you beak a punctuation rule and an editor suggests a revision, you should be able to defend your punctuation choices.

Who’s right?

Here’s a list of ten famous authors who violated, even spat on, punctuation rules without any harm to their reputation. They would side with Rusch.

To be fair, I’ve over-simplified Rusch’s position. She did say a writer must first learn the rules of punctuation before breaking them. We’ve heard that confusing advice before—learn the rules before you break them. Huh?

Here’s the catch, though. If you’re an editor (or a fellow writer doing a critique), it can be difficult to distinguish whether the writer’s flouting of the rules is part of the writer’s style and is meant to serve the story, or if the writer broke the rules out of haste, laziness, poor self-editing, etc.

If you’re a beginning writer still struggling to find your voice, the recommendations of an editor can seem like a burning-bush pronouncement, complete with stone tablets. It can be intimidating to fight back and defend every punctuation violation, as Rusch advocates.

Until recently, I’d never understood the editorial side of the business, but as a first-time co-editor of an upcoming anthology, I’m beginning to appreciate it. Any submitted manuscript does provide certain clues about why a writer broke a rule.

For instance, are there other mistakes? Are there misspellings and grammatical errors that fling a reader out of the story? If so, chances are the writer lacks a defendable rationale for breaking punctuation rules.

On the other hand, as an editor, did you breeze through the story, caught up in the writer’s world, and only notice punctuation violations upon re-reading? If so, you know this author has an established voice, a solid command of when to break rules. Edit such a story with a light touch.

Rusch’s position is a strong one, and it should be the goal of every fiction writer. Convey your story using your voice. If that means breaking some rules, do so, and stand ready to defend your choices.

Not apologizing for this final em-dash, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 3, 2020Poseidon's ScribePermalink

On Beyond Slash

In his 1955 book On Beyond Zebra! Dr. Seuss had child readers imagining several new alphabetical letters occurring after our last one—Z. Today, I’m advocating the addition of some new punctuation and fonts. Since the last punctuation mark on my keyboard is the slash (/), we’ll venture beyond slash. Way beyond.

Let’s face it.There are times when currently available punctuation just won’t do. Moreover, the number of keys on a keyboard no longer limits us. This is the age of multi-use buttons. Software programmers could easily show one or more pop-up keyboards that replace QWERTY with alternate punctuation marks and fonts. If we can have innumerable emojis and emoticons, we can certainly add some fresh punctuation marks.

Many others have proposed new punctuation marks that haven’t caught on yet, but should. You’ll enjoy other blog posts on this topic by Adrienne Crezo, Randy Krum, Keith Houston, and Zachery Brasier. I’ll start my list with marks advocated by others, and finish with two of my own invention.

ElRey Mark

The ElRey Mark is a variant of the exclamation point invented by photographer Ellen Susan. The original intent of the exclamation mark was to denote very strong feelings or loud shouts, like “Stop!” or “Watch out!” However, people now use it even for mild emphasis, as in “Thanks!” Named for ‘The King’ in Spanish, the ElRey Mark’s intent is to express a moderate amount of excitement or optimism. However, given the two dots in the ElRey Mark, I’d propose swapping it with the Exclamation Mark, so that ElRey would denote the stronger emphasis.

We really need the Exclamation Comma and especially the Question Comma. They would permit exclamations and questions within a sentence, rather than having to reword them to occur at the sentence’s end. Invented and patented by Americans Leonard Storch, Haagen Ernst Van and Sigmund Silber in 1992, the symbols didn’t catch on and their patent has lapsed.

Interrobang

An advertising executive named Martin K. Speckter came up with the Interrobang in 1952. It combines the exclamation and question marks for those times when it’s tough to choose between the two, but your editor will only permit one, as in: “What? Now you tell me you don’t know how to land the plane?”

I love the Love Point, invented in 1966 by author Jean-Pierre Marie Herve-Bazin. Yes, authors should be able to express the emotion of love through words alone, but the Love Point would add a charming emphasis to it. Couldn’t the world use a little more love?

Quotation marks are supposed to be for actual quotations, so there’s a need for a way to denote“air quotes” indicating what someone should have said or seems to be saying. Mockquotation Marks would serve that need in a visually obvious way. As near as I can determine, we can thank Mike Trapp of collegehumor.com for these marks.

Doubt Point

I’ve added the Doubt Point to my list, not because I think it’s particularly useful to express doubt through punctuation, but because it looks so Seussian. It was another creation by Jean-Pierre Marie Herve-Bazin.

Here’s another punctuation mark I’d love to see for its appearance alone. Originally called the Hedera when used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the French renamed it the Fleuron, the name I prefer. Although they used it to separate paragraphs, I don’t care what we’d use it for; I just like the way it looks.

Now we come to my own inventions. Others have proposed reverse italics for other purposes, but I’d used them to add emphasis to a word or two within an already italicized section. It’s common to do that by putting that word in normal font, but that just doesn’t do it for me. Reverse italics would be a way of nesting emphasized words.

We’ve saddled the apostrophe with double duty for too long, and it’s often misused and confused. The apostrophe’s original use was to substitute for letters we’re not showing. We call those contractions, like don’t for do not. However, we use the same mark for possession. Allow me to introduce the Possesstrophe. It even looks like two arms reaching out to possess the word or phrase beyond the ‘s.’ The Possesstrophe would resolve the need to remember the rule for it’s as a contraction and its as a possessive.

What do you say? Let’s get some of these new marks accepted in standard usage. Go on beyond slash with—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 16, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Do You Semicolon?

Among punctuation marks, the semicolon is the nerdy kid who gets picked on and is chosen last for sports teams. The semicolon goes on to college, of course, and finds steady employment, but never moves up or achieves greatness, and yet falls asleep each night dreaming of a life that might have been.

As a refresher, the semicolon links major sentence elements together. It can keep two related independent clauses loosely joined; it also separates items in a list, especially when some listed items contain commas.

Search on your keyboard and you’ll find the semicolon, perhaps sharing a rarely used button with the colon. Yes, it’s that half-comma and half-period thingy—(;). Take a good look, because it may not appear on future keyboards.

That’s right. The semicolon is falling into disuse. With limited keyboard territory available, that’s a kiss of death. Future generations might well ponder about the meaning of that strange mark, unless nearer term translators simply delete it from all texts, substituting commas or periods (or emojis) as they see fit.

Semicolons have hit on hard times, or Times. Ben Macintyre, a columnist in The Times of London wrote, “Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon…Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”

The semicolon’s chief detractor, however, had to be Kurt Vonnegut, who said semicolons are “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

Sheesh. It’s a semicolon, guys. Do you have to drag sex into everything?

Most people don’t hate the semicolon; they either don’t understand it or don’t see the point of it. Scorn from Vonnegut is one thing; at least he paid the semicolon some attention. But to be ignored and forgotten is far worse.

Despite being the shunned wallflower at parties where the comma and period are the hits, the semicolon boasts of a noble history. In The Tempest, Shakespeare has Prospero use one: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” The Bible is smitten with semicolons, starting in the second phrase of Genesis: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Eight semicolons lend their gravitas to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution teems with forty-eight of them.

That’s all fine and good, you’re thinking, but tell me what semicolons have done for us lately. And none of that poetry stuff, either. Cite some recent examples of great prose featuring a semicolon.

Sorry, I can’t. It seems that profound prose demands either the finality of a period or the casual linking of a comma. I’ve had anthology editors (bless their persnickety blue pencils) strike some of my semicolons out of existence with their sweeping editorial delete marks. Even so, I use the mark sparingly, varying between two and thirteen times in my last five published stories, for an average of one semicolon in every 54 sentences.

The semicolon enjoys the support of a few writers out there, including Ben Dolnick and Mary Norris, but such praise is rare and scattered. There is no organized ‘Save the Semicolon’ movement, or even a Kickstarter or GoFundMe page.

So, Caring Readers, it’s up to you. Preserving this punctuation mark will depend on how often we all use it. Do your part; my part will be done by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 14, 2018Poseidon's ScribePermalink

Your Writing Voice

We call it laryngitis when you lose your voice, but what if you never found it in the first place? To be clear, I’m not writing about a medical condition of the larynx, but rather about your writing voice.

Definition

What is a writing voice? I liken it to your vocal voice in that it is distinctively yours, an individual indicator like your fingerprints, your retina patterns, and your signature. It’s a marker that can be used to identify you.

In other words, a few paragraphs could be taken at random from your published stories, and a reader might be able to recognize that you’re the author.

Is your writing that identifiable? Is it unique? If not, how can you get to that point?

Two Elements

Before we arrive at a way to answer those questions, I’ll cover what I believe to be the two elements of a writer’s voice.

The first is the subject, the topic about which you commonly write. This can take the form of a genre or theme. Someday when you have compiled a full body of work and your name comes up, if people say, “That’s the author who writes about ______,” it’s that ‘______’ that forms part of your voice.

The other element has to do with style. It’s not just the subjects you write about, it’s how you do it. The Wikipedia article on Writer’s Voice suggests that this element; a combination of character development, dialogue, diction, punctuation, and syntax; is all there is to a writing voice. I’m not willing to discount the subject/topic element, though.

Discovery

How do you find your voice? This marvelous blog post by author Todd Henry provides a great way to help you find your voice by answering ten questions. These questions help you reach your inner passions and hopes. In this way you’ll touch the deep emotions and motivations inside.

Why does that method work, for discovering your voice? Certainly the answers will help you determine the subject half of your voice. The answers will suggest topics you should write about or genres to write in. Only by tapping in to your central core of strong enthusiasms will you be able to sustain the discipline to complete what you start to write. If you work at it, those deep hopes and passions will become evident in your writing.

What about the style element? How are you supposed to discover that? I’m not sure answering Todd Henry’s ten questions will answer that. I believe your writing style is a matter of imitation early on, then leading to experimentation, and finally perfecting.

No Guarantee

Let me set some expectations about this process of finding your writing voice. In the end, you’ll have a unique voice, one recognizable as you. That doesn’t mean anyone else wants to hear it. This isn’t a recipe for fame or financial success in writing.

I’ll write a blog post sometime laying out the sure-fire, step-by-step formula for how to become famous and rich by writing.

Sure. Keep checking back for that one.

What’s the point, you’re asking, of this voice discovery process? Why go through it? I’d answer that all the authors who are famous, or rich, or whose writing is considered classic, all of them have a distinctive writing voice.

I think finding your voice is necessary, but not sufficient, for success. You might discover your writing voice only to learn it’s not marketable. If high sales numbers are what you’re after, experiment more. Try slight alterations of voice until you hit the combination of subject and style that sells.

Best of luck to you in finding your writing voice. Still searching for mine, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 19, 2014Poseidon's ScribePermalink