Article for 2014 Feb 08

2014

2014 Feb

Feb 08 Sat

There are certain grammatical and punctuational customs that irritate me and will therefore be flouted in this article, so I apologise for the loss in readability due to my strange punctuatings. I will also for the next few articles be writing example constructions in pale blue, to avoid overusing quotation marks, and, where I do use those marks, displaying them as single (’) rather than double (”). Talking of which, one of my pet peeves is the comma before said quotation marks.

I’ve stubbed my toe. That sentence requires no comma - it’s a simple subject-verb-object construction. I said these words. requires no comma, for the same reason. But add some actual speech, as the object of the verb ‘said’, and such a sentence is generally written as I said, ‘Ow, the pain!’, whereas I find it more logical, albeit less visually appealing, to write I said ‘Ow, the pain!’..

Notice that I’ve also added two full stops, the blue one because while the exclamation mark finishes the Ow, the pain! exclamation it does not finish the I said ... . sentence enveloping it, as indicated by the quotation mark after the exclamation mark. (Similarly, the pale grey one is there to finish the sentence enveloping the I said ... . sentence.)

Such syntactic Inception is commonly found with brackets (this is another reason for a change to how we punctuate around direct speech!). That last sentence is seen as acceptable, whereas My sister exclaimed ‘I love direct speech!’. would not be despite it likewise being a sentence with another nested within it. I’m convinced that the only reason the exclamation mark (or question mark or full stop) can end two sentences at once when used with quotation marks is because it’s traditional to have that happen.

You may argue that when you speak something like And Matilda was like, ‘No way José!’ you naturally pause before reporting what Matilda said, and punctuation indicates a pause so there should be punctuation before No way José!. But that belies the fact that there is punctuation before No way José!: the quotation mark itself. You might as well write I’d left for the shops., I wasn’t there when she arrived,,,,, but I returned soon enough to see her leave.,, which is ridiculous. Surely the quotation mark can subsume the comma’s role there! It is, after all, a comma itself, an inverted comma!

Yeah, perhaps it would be good to invert established practices.