Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

«Я постоянно нахожусь в зависимости от чего-нибудь – обычно в той сфере, где нет групп поддержки. Например, без точки с запятой я не могу продержаться дольше двух сотен слов»

A friend of mine who runs a Shakespeare reading group in New England tells a delightful story of a chap playing Duncan in Macbeth who listened with appropriate pity and concern while the wounded soldier in Act I gave his account of the battle, and then cheerfully called out, "Go get him, surgeons!" (It's supposed to be "Go, get him surgeons.")

The big final rule for the comma is one that you won't find in any books by grammarians. It is quite easy to remember, however. The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else – yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.

One of the best descriptions of punctuation cones in a book entitled The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist by Thomas McCormack. He says the purpose of punctuation is “to tango the reader into the pauses,inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey”

... punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a “separator” that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom.

Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living-room’?” And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”