Lesser-Known Puncuation Rules

I used Grammarly to grammar check this post because 10 eyes are better than two, and if you don’t believe me, just ask a scorpion (although scorpions are known for other things than having excellent proofreading skills, aren’t they?)  If you’d like to enlist a few extra sets of eyes to check your work before it goes flying out into cyberspace, I recommend grammarly.com.

Meanwhile, let’s brush up on punctuation. I have a pair of earrings made from two old typewriter keys: The semi-colon key and the quotation mark key.  I love them.  I wrote a humorous novel (“Sisters in the Mix”) about a TV cooking show host who’s also a grammar fanatic.  She corrects signs with a Sharpie, something I occasionally admit to doing, myself.  From apostrophes to misspellings, she’s on it.

            So today, I’m going to share a few lesser-known punctuation rules that all professional writers should know, and now you can join the quiet army of sticklers who paint out mistakes and make the world a better place.  I leave the choice to you.

            The first one surprises even some English majors.  When you’re writing a sentence that is fully contained within the parentheses, you keep the period in there, too.  It only goes on the outside when the parenthetical phrase is at the end of an otherwise ordinary sentence.  For example, Jim outran the cops (he was in the Olympics, remember).  (Most Olympians are not crooks, though, and don’t have to do this.)

            Next, when do you use a dash, and when do you use the shorter hyphen?  A hyphen is for compound adjectives before nouns, such as self-deprecating, half-hearted, high-maintenance, low-key, and the like.  It’s also used in numerical cases such as a 10-year-old, or a 10-foot pole.  A dash, which you make by typing two hyphens, is used to get extra attention, as if you’ve grabbed your reader by the sleeve and said, “Hold it—look at this.”  Sometimes it replaces parentheses, when you want a bit more impact.  But don’t overuse it.

            And speaking of parentheses, use them when you want to share an aside, something not essential to the sentence, but nevertheless something you want the reader to know.  For example, “Joni drove her husband’s car (the convertible Aston Martin) to Monterey.”  Okay, fine, we do not have an Aston Martin; I just want to see if my husband is reading this blog post.

            When providing a list of things, do you use a comma after the next-to-last one?  That is called the Oxford comma, and it’s a personal style choice.  But I prefer it for clarity, and this one example illustrates why:  On her vacation she met the Pope, a clown and a bank robber.  Without the Oxford comma, it appears that the Pope is a clown and a bank robber.  If you write, “On her vacation she met the Pope, a clown, and a bank robber,” then it’s clear she met three distinct people.  

            Kurt Vonnegut told writers never to use the semi-colon; I love it.  In fact, it’s my favorite punctuation mark and belongs in a sentence where each section could stand alone as a sentence, but is related enough to be joined to the other one.  “Drive slowly; children are present” is a good example of needing a semi-colon.  A comma just doesn’t convey the “because” aspect of that directive, and chopping it into two sentences sounds robotic.  A dash might work, but is a bit panicky-looking.  

            When should you use a colon?  A colon indicates that a list is coming up, and is only used if the previous statement could stand alone as a sentence. The old rule was to put two spaces after a colon, but one space is acceptable these days.  Joni’s blog has three parts: Humor, Writing, and Cooking.

How do you work with characters whose names end with S?  Well, you can avoid those names forever, or simply learn the rules.  The Jones’s cat is like the Joneses; he has a name ending in S—Rufus.  And that is Rufus’s bowl.

Some writers still struggle with punctuating the word, “its.”  This is because we use an apostrophe to show the possessive in people’s names, such as “John’s book.”  But don’t do that with its.  Use it when the word is a contraction for “it is.”  This sentence shows both usages: It’s a miracle its walls are still standing after the hurricane.

            And put the apostrophe after the s when you’re talking about a group, but before the s if you’re speaking of one person. “The teachers’ cars were all vandalized,  and the gym teacher’s son is the chief suspect.”

            There are many more rules than these, but the best way to learn them is to read all you can.  Hey—that’s also the best way to learn how to write.  You’ll simply get a feel for it, and recognize accepted conventions in grammar, spelling, vocabulary, and style. You’ll also notice when they change, which, regrettably, they always do.