The Peeved Pedant on Punctuation

December 2002

Basically: Never use punctuation if you don't know what it means.

Never. You'll just make yourself look silly to someone who does know what it means. A child who hasn't learned the alphabet will just create nonsense by hitting the keyboard. If you haven't learned what a punctuation mark means, what makes you think that you will do any better with it?

Don't add things to a logo or slogan just because you think they make it look better.

I know that you have seen this done in advertising lately. This is because, if knowledge of grammar were dynamite, most of the people designing logos couldn't blow their noses. I'm not sure how the universities of the world managed to produce a generation of illiterate graphic designers, but instead of being duped by them, you should join the educated in mocking them (update 6/03: until the graphic designers that I'm in art school with graduate. They seem like a much smarter bunch).

Don't use punctuation as decoration! I said...

`Don't use!
pünctùatiøñ
as [decoration]

ASCII art and emoticons are not included in the above statement; I'm all for Internet art. :) I'm just trying to put an end to the decoration of prose with things that change meaning in a way that is not intended.

The Peeved Pedant's Points

1. Ads may claim that "FOX & [friends]" is the "smarter" news program, but [misused] brackets are not [cute], they're [stupid]. Brackets are not used for emphasis of a term. If you want to emphasize text, make it bold or italic. If these options are not available, as in some email, mark emphasized text with _underscores_ . Brackets will most often appear inside a long quotation to indicate a word that has been changed or clarified (usually to provide a name or change a verb tense).

2. The quotation marks above indicate an "actual" quote from an "ad." If not indicating a quotation, you should not use quotation marks in ordinary writing: it implies a sarcastic reference to what other people call the item in question.

For example, the pro-life debater might type,

Our "right" to abortion is just as large as our "right" to kill a stranger on the street.

And, for equality of examples, the pro-choice debater might type:

This "murder" is really no more than a simple surgical procedure.

In both of these examples, the terms in quotation marks deserve them because they are the other side's label, used here in a degrading and sarcastic manner. These terms are so widely used that they do not need a citation, but don't forget to provide bibliographical information for quotations and sources you use in your writing.

Addition 11/03: And while I'm on quotation marks --- STOP saying "quote-unquote" BEFORE you verbally quote something! It's not a single term! You say "quote" to indicate the start of a quotation and "unquote" to indicate the end.

WRONG: "Today the teacher said quote-unquote There's no class, so we left.

You say quote/unquote when you encounter the ".

Transcribed, the example above is ""There's no class
NOT "There's no class" !

I've heard TV news anchors do this a lot lately; I'm thinking of distributing flyers around the journalism school...

3. Don't just add, commas everywhere, to make your writing look, pretty, sometimes even stringing, several sentences together, this is known as a comma splice, and it is very bad. There are many good references that will tell you where commas are needed. If you feel that you need some commas, please consult the rules before placing them randomly. The same advice also applies to paragraph breaks.

4. Do not italicize letters in the middle of a word in an attempt to make it pretty. This just confuses readers, who have to stop and puzzle out the mixed signals. I would have considered this point too obvious to be worth the bandwidth but for a television program (I believe on A&E) whose logo I want to read as "ad-OH-ption."

5. Likewise, the interesting symbols that you find in the Character Map have meanings. You should not add them to any word that you want to look exotic (or êxötíc).

6. DO NOT TYPE EVERYTHING AS IF YOU ARE SHOUTING.
Do Not Capitalize Every Word As If Your Entire Email Is A Book Title.
keep impersonations of ee cummings to a minimum

7. I feel that this point should be made in any article on Internet punctuation: hax0r5, j00 d0 nOT 1mPre5$ ANy0N3. Just because you can talk to a computer doesn't mean that you are entitled to abandon spelling. Whether or not someone babbles in your code is no indication of his/her computer skills. I've won awards for both my programming and my writing.

And besides, you have to spell things correctly when programming... some languages are even case-sensitive!

8. What applies to hackers also applies to the stereotypical AOLer.
u r not gr8 4 using silly symbols.

The basic point of both 7 and 8 is this: writing is communication. If the reader has to go and get a chart to decode your statements, you are going to lose people who would be your audience. And before you get too elitest, let me assure you that many of these are people you would enjoy talking with. After all, you yourself were once ignorant of Internet jargon.

 

Home - Cathy - Writing - Art - Animation - Other