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Chapter 26: Polishing Your Work for Publication
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Punctuating properly is important for two reasons: sense and style.
Punctuating incorrectly can make a sentence mean something completely different
to what you intend; think of the difference in meaning between ‘Let’s
eat, Grandma!’ and ‘Let’s eat Grandma!’.
The key punctuation marks, with a basic guide to their most common uses, are:
✓ Comma: Separates elements in a list of three or more items, before the
conjunctions ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘for’, ‘nor’, ‘yet’, ‘or’ and ‘so’, or divides a separate
clause in a sentence, as I’m doing now.
✓ Colon: Introduces a list, an idea or a quote, or divides two complete and
linked sentences.
✓ Semi-colon: Divides subgroups within a list or two linked sentences. I
love the semi-colon; it’s elegant and subtle. You can also use it to make a
pause somewhere in length between that of a full stop and a comma.
✓ Hyphen: Links two words that go together, especially when used as an
adjective: hence ‘We have an air-conditioned car but air conditioning
in the villa’ or a ‘half-baked cake that’s half baked’. If in doubt, look the
word up.
✓ Dash: Increasingly used instead of a semi-colon to create a pause. Also
used to show interrupted speech – or instead of commas to separate out
a separate clause within a sentence – like this.
✓ Full stop: Comes at the end of a sentence. You can use a question mark
instead for a question, or an exclamation mark to give emphasis (but not
too often!).
✓ Apostrophe: Shows that part of a word is missing, as in ‘it’s’ for ‘it is’ or
‘don’t’ for ‘do not’. It also shows possession as in ‘John’s’ or ‘Renuka’s’.
Remember that for plurals, the apostrophe comes after the ‘s’: so you
write ‘I took away one boy’s toy’ but ‘I took away all the boys’ toys’.
Punctuation is also important for style. The pauses in speech as you read
aloud can make all the difference to the sound of the prose.
Look at the beginning of this opening sentence:
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in . . .
—Henry James (The Wings of the Dove, Penguin Classics, 2008, first
published 1909)