Collins Improve Your Punctuation

If that statistic puts you into a spin, at least the functions of the sentence are quite straightforward:

• To make statements.

• To ask questions.

• To request action.

• To express feelings.

It’s also reasonable to say that a sentence should express a single idea, and that it should be complete in thought and construction. Like this:

The rare great crested newt was once called the great warty newt.

The sentence can be quite elastic, and punctuation allows us to expand this useful unit:

The rare great crested newt, which is native to Britain and rarely exceeds fifteen centimetres in length, was once called the great warty newt.

You’ll notice how the cunning commas have enabled us to double the length of the sentence without sacrificing any of its original clarity.

Sentences can also shrink, often alarmingly:

‘Don’t!’

That single word, providing it is given meaning by other words and thoughts surrounding it, is a sentence, or more accurately, a sentence fragment. Here it is, now in a context that provides its relevance and meaning:

I went over to the door and tried to open it.

‘Don’t!’

I spun around, searching for the owner of the angry voice.

In the darkness, a face appeared …

You can see that not only the surrounding words, but also a range of spaces and punctuation marks, help to give that single word the meaning intended. Here is another example, the opening of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

The first three sentences in this passage are not grammatical sentences at all, and most grammarians would choke over several of the others, too. But it is such a vivid evocation of a miserable rainy November day in Victorian London that few would dare to challenge the novelist’s masterly manipulation of the language. Or argue too much about ‘proper’ sentences. At least they are punctuated correctly; they all start with a capital letter and finish with a full stop.

How Long is a Sentence?

A question that crops up with astonishing regularity is, ‘How long should a sentence be?’ The usual answer is, neither too long nor too short. A sensible approach is to regard short sentences as more easily understood than long, complicated ones, but an endless succession of staccato sentences can be irritating to the reader. It really comes down to judgment. Careful writers will ‘hear’ their work as they proceed; that way the sentences will form themselves into a logical, interesting, economical and, with luck, elegant flow of thought.

Here’s a piece of prose that’s more a form of mental torture than sentence:

A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses or if he would not be unable or virtually unable to walk if he habitually wore or used a prosthesis or an artificial aid which is suitable in his case.

That is a grammatical sentence written by someone expecting it to be understood, but it defies understanding. Yet what it is trying to say is something very simple and which can be unambiguously expressed in our ideal sentence, ‘complete in thought and construction’:

Persons are regarded as physically disabled if they always need an artificial aid to walk.

As you can see, sentences can be grammatical without making any sense. The linguist Noam Chomsky proved this by forming a chain of words that bore the least logical relationship with each other: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. The words make no sense but it is a well-formed sentence complete with verb.

The Paragraph

The most quoted definition of a paragraph is that of Sir Ernest Gowers, who wrote in The Complete Plain Words that it is ‘a unit of thought, not of length … homogeneous in subject matter and sequential in treatment of it.’ The Times, in advising its journalists, adds: ‘Rarely should a paragraph in The Times be of only one sentence, least of all a short one, unless special emphasis is needed. Long paragraphs are tedious but short ones are jerky and can be equally hard to follow. The best advice is to remember Gowers and ask, before pressing the paragraph key, “Have I finished that thought?”.’

All very well, but of all the units of punctuation the paragraph is the least precise and the most resistant to rules. Sometimes they are indented, sometimes not. Quite often, the first paragraph under a heading is not indented, although all subsequent paragraphs are. Browse through a handful of books and you’ll note that paragraphs can consist of a single line or a single word; you’ll also see leviathan examples which take up a page or more.

Here are some practical pointers. Think of the end of a paragraph as a sort of breathing space for both writer and listener. The writer needs to gather his thoughts afresh, and the reader needs a momentary rest from concentration. In writing, a new paragraph marks a break or change in the flow of thought, which is as good a reason as any to begin on a fresh line.

Capitalisation

Capital letters are an important form of punctuation in that they help to guide the eye and mind through a text. Try this:

mi5 is the branch of the british intelligence organisation responsible for internal security and counter-espionage in the united kingdom. mi6 is the branch responsible for international espionage. the us has its fbi, south africa has its boss, israel its mossad and the republic of ireland its g2. spies love abbreviations. Then, in britain there’s mi1, mi8, mi9 and, ultimately, wx, the butlins of the spy world.

That’s a paragraph shorn of capital letters. It’s readable, with some effort, but how much easier would the eye glide through it were the beginnings of sentences and names guide-posted with capital letters – not to mention abbreviations!

Using capitals to flag the start of sentences is clear enough but confusion surrounds the capitalising of certain nouns and names. Try this Capital Quiz:

Capital Quiz

Of this dozen nouns and names, half are incorrect.

Which ones?

the Army, Spring and Autumn, bulldog, Great Dane, union jack, Vincent Van Gogh, jacuzzi, french fries, Renaissance, Venus, new testament, down under.

[Answers: the army, spring and autumn, Union Jack, Vincent van Gogh, Jacuzzi, New Testament, Down Under. The others are correct.]

Some capitalisations are logical but many are not. Some are consistent throughout the language while others are arbitrary, differing from country to country and even from one publisher or newspaper to another. Here, as a guideline, are the generally accepted capitalisations for a range of fairly common nouns and names.

A Guide to Capitalisation

Pride and Prejudice and Punctuation

When Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 our system of punctuation had developed to the stage where few further changes would be made.

But one patch of inconsistency lingered: the practice of not always treating question and exclamation marks as doing the job of full stops:

“And poor Mr Darcy! dear Lizzie, only consider what he must have suffered. Such a disappointment! and with the knowledge of your ill opinion too! and having to relate such a thing to his sister! It is really too distressing, I am sure you must feel it so.”

“What say you, Mary? for you are a lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books …” “It is unaccountable! in every view it is unaccountable!”

Today, of course, question marks and exclamation marks are almost always followed by capitals.