Proper punctuation is the mark of a good writer

[Joe Carillo]

We should be grateful that English has 10 punctuation devices to help writers closely approximate its stops, pauses, and hesitations as a spoken language. In the discussion that follows, however, I think there’s no need anymore to take up the period (full stop), comma (,), question mark (?), exclamation mark (!), parenthesis (...), and brackets [...], for I expect all these six punctuation devices to be already second nature to all who can read and understand this column’s English comfortably. So we’ll discuss here only the usage of the less familiar semi-colon (; ), colon (: ), dash (-), and double-dash (—).

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1. The semi-colon. This punctuation device does three things for English statements. The first is to separate and mark the unity of two or more sentences that are either closely related or complementary. Example: “It was the man’s third attempt to get a visa at the U.S. embassy; always he would break into a sweat when the consular officer called his name.” Here, the semi-colon denotes the intimate cause-and-effect relationship between the ideas of the first and second sentences.

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The second thing the semi-colon does is to indicate stronger divisions—and mark a linkage in thought, function, or sequence—in longer sentences already punctuated by commas. Example: “That was the dream job he had long waited for, something he had prepared for these past many years, and he was so happy that it was now within his reach; but alas, when the recruitment officer handed him the recruitment test, he saw that he had to write a 500-word English essay on the value of foreign travel, and he just knew he couldn’t hack it.”

Observe that in these two uses of the semi-colon, a period or full stop would have served as well in its place. The semi-colon, however, works much better than the period in emphasizing or dramatizing the special relatedness of two or more sentences. The choice, however, is ultimately a matter of style on the part of the writer.

2. The colon. A major function of the colon is to separate two main clauses where the first introduces the second. Example: “Turning around, the wife of Lot saw what she was not supposed to see: Sodom and Gomorrah vaporizing in a burning holocaust, one so intense that it turned her body into a pillar of salt.” A second function of the colon, this time as an external sentence-marker, is to show that the statement made by one sentence, though complete in itself, also introduces the statement to be made by the next sentence. Example: “Please explain something that bothers me: why is it that you keep on opening and closing your umbrella every five minutes?”

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This colon also has the unique function of connecting statements that are not necessarily sentences, in what is called the aphoristic sequence. Examples: “To put it simply: I don’t really care what happens.” Another: “To make a guess: The queen herself is the thief.”

3. The dash. As a punctuation device, the dash functions in exactly the same way as the colon; you can replace with dashes all the colons in the examples in the preceding paragraph and everything will be just fine. It’s often just a matter of style.

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4. The double-dash. An excellent alternative to the comma and parenthesis, the double-dash neatly allows for inserting asides or other parenthetical information to sentences, as in: “Many of my readers agree that—if only Filipinos worked harder, had more discipline, and wrote and spoke better English—the Philippines can become the next economic development powerhouse in Asia, probably even a more dominant one than Japan or Korea.”

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I’d say that mastery of these four special punctuation devices is the mark of a good writer in English.   

(Next: Avoiding awful misuses of the English possessive)      October 29, 2020    

This essay, 2,016th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the October 22, 2020 Internet edition of The Manila Times,© 2020 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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