PUNCTUATION: The Itch of Writing Guide
What you need to know about punctuation, including how not to commit a comma splice
Since we were all speakers before we were writers, meaning was first expressed by how something was said; punctuation evolved to help those few who could read to share written texts with everyone else.
This new post in the Itch of Writing Guides series concentrates on how writers can use these shared systems of communication to convey their narrative.
Punctuation still has these two roles in writing:
evoking the pattern and rhythm of how the meaning is expressed
articulating the meaning of the written sentence itself.
This is true for prose narrative as well as dialogue, because even a written ‘voice’ has its origins in speech. Commas evoke the tiny lift at the end of a phrase, dashes get used for all sorts of small pauses, full stops might express how a statement stops dead, even if it isn’t a grammatically complete sentence.
The grammarians set about explaining and systematising how it all works - aka ‘the rules’ – but they tended to focus on the semantic meaning, and not reckon with the expressive aspects that creative writing needs just as much. So sometimes you may have to choose: what is correct in formal grammar for making meaning clear may not be right for making your prose as expressive and emotionally clear as it needs to be.
But that’s not a free pass for anyone who can’t be bothered to learn and understand the conventions. You’re only likely to make your writing more expressive, while never sacrificing clarity and meaning, if you have internalised a really strong sense of how and why those conventions work.
When you’re trying to move beyond correct, to right, Reading like a writer, and reading aloud can really help: when did you last stop to study and think about how your favourite writers punctuate?
On the other hand, don’t panic. Your manuscript is not a published book, it’s only a tool for producing a published book, so for many of the minor (and often disputed) conventions, being clear and consistent is what matters. Your editor or publisher may well have a different house style, and you can cross that bridge when you come to it.
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