PUNCTUATION PEEVES

posted by James Reel

    Yesterday I started proofreading a 400-page self-published book of baseball statistics. I haven’t yet decided whether this counts as suicide or euthanasia. It’s one of those projects that has me screaming by page 2, because by then it’s already obvious that the author will commit some particular error many times on every single page. In this case, for 400 pages. The problem in this book is an absence of hyphens. Imagine the first sentence of this post stripped of the hyphens, multiply by at least six instances per page, then by 400 pages, and you’ll see why this project may turn out to be a human-rights violation.
    At least the book isn’t littered with other basic errors that are alarmingly common among contributors to other publications I deal with; some of those errors even make it into print. Here are a few things that everybody who puts a sentence together ought to—but does not—know:

• If, as in the previous sentence, you initiate an interruption in a sentence with an em-dash (the long kind of dash, equal to the width of the letter “m”), you have to close it with another em-dash. NOT A COMMA, for crying out loud. Either use two dashes or two commas, but not one of each.
• In American English, commas and periods are placed inside quotation marks, not outside. Always. No exceptions. Ever.
• Without going into an explanation of restrictive and non-restrictive clauses and phrases, I’ll call this complaint “My Wife Gives Me Pause.” The phrase “the great Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso” is wrong because the comma means that Caruso was the ONLY great Italian tenor. Take the comma out, and the phrase rightly suggests that there have been several great Italian tenors, and Caruso is the one we’re talking about now. My mnemonic device for this rule is “my wife gives me pause”—use the comma when writing about your spouse, because unless you live in certain towns along the Utah-Arizona border, you can have only one wife or husband. Thus, “my wife, Jane.” Writing “my daughter, Judy,” means that you have only one daughter, and her name is Judy. Writing “my daughter Judy” means that Judy isn’t the only daughter you have. Got it? My wife gives me pause.