DiSUm, a.a. 2018—19, Scienze e lingue per la comunicazione (L20) Lingua e comunicazione inglese 1, prof. Iain Halliday Lezione martedì 4 dicembre 2018 (14 di 27), Aula Magna, ore 08:00—10:00

punctuation (dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s)

The use of commas cannot be learned by rule. Ernest Gowers, The Complete Plain Words (1954)

Do not be afraid of the semicolon; it can be most useful. Ernest Gowers, ibid.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite Hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007)

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke. F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in Sheila Graham and Gerold Frank, Beloved Infidel (1959)

“To punctuate” doesn’t mean what happens to your bicycle tyre when you ride over a nail: that would be “to puncture”. “To punctuate” means to use punctuation marks to organize a piece of written text to make it more (or less) readable and effective.

The expression used in the subtitle above doesn’t relate specifically to punctuation. Literally the dots on the i’s and the crosses on the t’s refer only to graphical marks that are integral to the characters in question. But the expression does refer figuratively to the concept of being thorough, of preparing something with precision and in this sense it is very much related to the correct use of punctuation.

, comma This is certainly one of the most common (and useful) of all punctuation marks. If you stop to consider your natural speech in English or in Italian, you will realize that your discourse has moments of pause that can be preparation for a variety of purposes: introducing a quotation, for example, or a parenthetical clause just like that “for example”, or a relative clause, which usually begins with “which”.

. full stop (a.k.a. period or point, especially in American usage) This marks the end of a sentence, which means that the word that follows, as the first word of a new sentence, will have a capital letter. The full stop is also used to indicate an abbreviation – as in “a.k.a.” above, which we know stands for “also known as”.

; semicolon Ernest Gowers was right in suggesting that the semicolon can frighten people. It is a relatively rare punctuation mark whose use is often quite subtle in distinguishing two clauses that are independent, but not so independent that they should be two distinct sentences. More simply, the semicolon is often used to divide elements in lists that are preceded by a colon.

: colon This mark is used when we want to emphasize what follows, or when we want to introduce a list. Long quotations are often preceded by it. The dash can be used in a very similar way.

- hyphen Some compound nouns are hyphenated, others carry no hyphen and the words are united with no space between them. It can also be used to create some really-quite-striking compound adjectives. It is, of course, also used when the length of a line means that a word break is neces- sary. Two hyphens together -- conventionally represent an en dash, three --- an em dash. Microsoft Word will normally convert two hyphens into an N-dash – like so.

– dash (en dash, because it’s the width of a capital N) This is often used for parentheses, or with the same introductory – though less emphatic – function of the colon.

— dash (em dash, because it’s the width of a capital M) This dash is much more common in American than in British publishing and is often used—just as it is here—without spaces between the dash and the words in the line.

’ apostrophe (note that the shape of a curly apostrophe is like the numeral 9 and not the shape of the numeral 6) You certainly know that this mark coupled with the letter s is important in indicating (personal) possession in English syntax. You should also be aware that it is also used in indicating elisions or even omission of letters or syllables: “’Morning! Don’t start playing that ’60s music again!”

“ ” opening and closing inverted commas or quotation marks (double – “sixty-six and ninety-nine”) ‘ ’ opening and closing inverted commas or quotation marks (single – ‘six and nine’) Whether you use double or single inverted commas either to quote or to emphasize is a matter of personal choice and style. Obviously if you are quoting (or emphasizing) within quotes then you should use the style different from the original one: “Tim said, ‘I never really understood how quotation marks work.’” (Notice here that the full stop comes within the quotation marks … this is generally the case with all quotations in Anglophone publishing. Only in much shorter quotations, of one or two words, might the full stop or the comma come outside the “quotation marks”.

( ) opening and closing parentheses (commonly known as brackets) These are very similar to parenthetical dashes, though they do mean that the parenthesis becomes an element more distinct from the flow of the text itself.

[ ] opening and closing brackets (commonly known as square brackets) These, too, indicate a parenthesis, but a parenthesis from a source that is not the original author of the text – editors, for example, sometimes make comments within tests [sic].

. . . ellipsis Strictly speaking this indicates an omission, but it can be used stylistically to indicate a desire to leave something unsaid.

[. . .] ellipsis within square brackets This has a more specifically technical use in that it indicates a more or less lengthy omission in a quotation by whoever has prepared a text.

! exclamation mark I think F. Scott Fitgerald’s comment in the epigraph tells us much about this mark, which is often abused.

? question mark Do I really have to explain this one to you?

@ (commercial at) & (ampersand) These two symbols are not punctuation marks – they lead us more into the realm of character formation and typography – but they are ubiquitous and interesting. Although we’re all familiar with @ because of email addresses, the character has been on keyboards since the late nineteenth century as the “commercial at”, i.e. a symbol that means, “at the rate of”. The ampersand represents the conjunction “and” and is a ligature of the letters in the Latin word et. The name is the result of the conflation of “and per se and”. In Italian it is known as the e commerciale, while the “commercial at” becomes the much friendlier and childlike, chiocciola.

You will find many guides to effective use of punctuation on the internet. This one, for example, is basic, but reliable: http://www.examples-help.org.uk/punctuation/punctuation-marks.htm (December, 2018)