Making a Point (22 page)

Here, what follows is acting as the required object: ‘The subtitle read X', ‘John asked Y.' It's important to note this point of grammar, because one of the common errors in
using colons is to insert one before a list in cases like this:

The capital cities of Europe include: Paris, London, and Berlin.

While this sort of usage is common enough informally, it's considered bad practice in formal writing because ‘The capital cities of Europe include' doesn't make sense. The point is worth emphasizing, because unwanted colons seem to be on the increase, for reasons that aren't clear. It may have something to do with the television practice in competitive shows to announce the winners with a dramatic pause before the names:

The winners are — DRUM ROLL — Matthew and Sarah!

If we had to write this down, a better mark – given the informal setting – would be one or more dashes.

Related to this is the question of capitalization: should we use a capital letter after the colon? With quotations and direct speech, as we see, the answer is yes. It's yes also if what follows the colon is a series of sentences:

Two things would follow: First, the rivers would overflow. Second, the low-lying villages would be flooded.

Showing that the sentences are parallel is felt to be the more important issue:
both
sentences relate back to
Two things
. Hence the following version is disturbing, as the orthography is sending us contradictory messages at the same time:

Two things would follow: first, the rivers would overflow. Second, the low-lying villages would be flooded.

Where just one sentence follows, the answer is less clear, because usage varies:

Everyone accepted John's point: We had no choice but to go.

Everyone accepted John's point: we had no choice but to go.

The capitalized version is far more common in American English writing, but style guides differ. Publishers will have made their choices in their house styles. In other circumstances, the only advice is to make your choice and be consistent. Taste rules, once again. And if you don't like any of the above, the only solution is to rephrase.

Finally, it's useful to note cases where the use of a colon is semantically redundant, and the only reason to use it is tradition. I've already mentioned cases where it's dropped between a book-title and its subtitle, and where type size, font, colour, or layout makes the relationship between the elements clear. More commonly in everyday life we see it used after a salutation at the beginning of a formal letter.

To whom it may concern:

Dear Professor Smith:

This is standard practice in American English. British English traditionally uses the comma (though American influence is spreading). However, the stylistic issue isn't as critical as it used to be. The spacing conventions for letter-openings are sufficient to highlight any salutation, and punctuationless saluting is increasingly the norm. Most of the letters I receive these days – formal as well as informal – have neither colon nor comma. It's another manifestation of the move towards an uncluttered appearance in modern orthography.

Overall, the colon presents fewer problems of usage compared with other punctuation marks. In this it contrasts dramatically with the comma, which presents most of all.

24

Commas, the big picture

We are nearing the bottom of our punctuation hierarchy. To recapitulate:

• a text is divided into paragraphs (
  Chapter 15
  )
  
• a period (and sometimes other marks) separates sentences in paragraphs (
  Chapters 16
  –
  21
  )
  
• a semicolon separates two or more clauses (and sometimes other units) within sentences (
  Chapter 22
  )
  
• a colon separates two clauses (and sometimes other units) within sentences (
  Chapter 23
  ).
  

That leaves us with three more levels:

• a comma may separate clauses, but also separates phrases (often single words) within clauses
  
• a space separates words (dealt with in
  Chapter 2
  )
  
• a hyphen and an apostrophe separate elements within words (
  Chapters 27
  –
  9
  ).
  

These all present the writer with problems of usage.

Regardless of the approach to punctuation, the comma has always attracted particular attention. It's the longest section in traditional accounts, and the author invariably ends by making an apology for the inadequacy of his (I've not come across female grammarians or printers in researching this book) treatment. Here's William Cobbett, in Letter 14 to his son in
A Grammar of the English Language
(1829):

The comma marks the shortest pause that we make in speaking: and it is evident, that, in many cases, its use must depend upon taste.

In many cases, yes, but not in all. And what is taste anyway? If a lot of people have the same taste, in the way they use commas, what is it that unites them? There is evidently a certain amount of variation in the way commas are used, but it isn't infinite or totally idiosyncratic. In fact there are only a few cases where variation is possible, as we'll see.

Why is the section on commas the longest in any usage manual? It's because this mark is used more often than any other. Here are the totals found in a 72,000-word corpus (reported in the reference grammar published by Randolph Quirk and his associates in 1985,
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language
, p. 1613):

Obviously, such totals will reflect the genres included, so another survey of different material may alter the frequencies quite a bit, especially at the lower end. But the comma usually comes top. The reason is that it has a wider range of uses than any other mark. Most punctuation marks have a fairly restricted role: they separate sentences or the main parts of sentences (clauses). Commas can do this too, and additionally separate phrases and words. No other punctuation mark operates all the way down the grammatical scale.
I'll look at its use at the higher levels in this chapter, and in the next explore the way it's used at the lower levels.

Commas separate sentences? Not normally. Teachers would throw their hands up in horror at the thought. Any child who wrote:

I went to the beach at the weekend, I had an ice-cream …

would be likely to have the comma corrected. On the other hand, what would a teacher do if a (precocious) child came in the next day and said: ‘Please, miss, why did you correct my comma when in my history book about Julius Caesar it says this?'

I came, I saw, I conquered.

Read this chapter, would be my answer.

Punctuation has a differentiating function: it developed in order to allow writers to express differences of meaning. It would be pointless (
sic
) to have a punctuation mark that did exactly the same job as some other punctuation mark. One or the other would eventually die out, or would come to be associated with different kinds of users (such as British vs American). There will always be a few cases where there's an overlap in function – where users have a free choice between mark X and mark Y – but most of the uses will be distinct, and juxtaposing examples is the best way of seeing what the distinctions are.

That is why commas aren't usually used to join sentences. There are already marks which do that job very well – the period, the semicolon, and the colon, which allow us to make the broad distinctions of meaning I've discussed in previous chapters. Let me illustrate using dear old Smith and Brown of semicolon fame. We don't normally join two sentences like this:

Smith is going to speak about cars, Brown is going to speak about bikes.

This is making the comma do a job it was not designed to do. And in marking it wrong, in a learner's writing, it's important to explain this. The comma has evolved to convey a set of meanings that is different from those conveyed by other marks. To use it in a place where one of those other marks should go is to mislead your reader.

Once again, we're talking semantics. Discussing the use of the comma in solely grammatical terms is not the solution. We have to dig deeper. This is why the traditional grammars were of limited help. If we know how to talk about grammar, the description of this next sentence is easy to make:

Smith is going to speak about cars; and Brown is going to speak about bikes.

The semicolon is linking two independent clauses, the second one introduced by a coordinating conjunction. Now let's turn to this version:

Smith is going to speak about cars, and Brown is going to speak about bikes.

The description is the same: the comma is linking two independent clauses, the second one introduced by a coordinating conjunction. Grammar is thus no help in showing us when to use the comma and when the semicolon. We have to talk about the kind of meaning that the marks are conveying. Semantics again.

What commas do is they allow us to show a closer semantic association between the two clauses than if we used the semicolon. Let's recapitulate the point made about semicolons in
Chapter 22
:

Smith is going to speak about cars; Brown is going to speak about bikes.

The semicolon shows the clauses are linked, more than they would be if they were separated by a period; but the link is not very tight. Each clause could be used as an independent sentence without the other:

Smith is going to speak about cars.

Brown is going to speak about bikes.

The semantic link remains the same even if we reinforce the semicolon by a coordinating conjunction:

Smith is going to speak about cars; and Brown is going to speak about bikes.

The value of a coordinator is that it makes explicit the nature of the semantic relationship between the two clauses, and this can vary. We can replace the
and
by one of the other words that have a coordinating function, such as
but
,
or
, and
so
.

Now look what happens when we use a comma. Immediately the semantic link between the two clauses is tighter, and this is usually reflected by other signs of tightness in the second clause, such as:

Smith is going to speak about cars, and Brown will follow him by speaking about bikes.

Smith is going to speak about cars, and we're really looking forward to his talk on this subject.

Here, words like
him
,
his
, and
this
refer directly back to
Smith
(grammarians call this effect
anaphora
), and bind the two clauses tightly together. It's no longer possible to use the second clause as an independent sentence:

We're really looking forward to his talk on this subject.

The comma, in other words, mustn't be studied in isolation. It forms one of the ways in which we make a close semantic connection between clauses, and the closer that connection (shown by such devices as anaphora) the less likely we are to use a semicolon:

Smith is going to speak about cars; and we're really looking forward to his talk on this subject.

The punctuation disrupts the flow. The other cues in the second clause (
his
,
this
) are signalling that the writer sees it closely related to the first. The semicolon is signalling that the relationship is more distant. The writer can't have it both ways.

It's the tightness of that link which explains why, in a few instances, we
can
link independent sentences by a comma. This happens when the tightness is signalled by other features, usually by the sentences being completely parallel in construction and the rhetorical effect of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. That's why we see it in relation to Julius Caesar – and also here, in this fragment of Winston Churchill's speech to the House of Commons on 4 June 1940:

… we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills …

This shows how a rhetorical motive – he is in the last, climactic paragraph of his discourse, and the end of the speech is just seconds away – can use the comma to link any number of sentences. That's why I said ‘don't normally join' above. But you have to be an experienced language user to use this strategy effectively.

The tightness of the semantic link shown by a comma is also why we can use it in a much wider range of constructions. Semicolons reinforce the link between clauses that coordinate ideas. Commas do this too, as we've just seen, but they also reinforce clauses where one idea is subordinated to another, as shown by the use of subordinating conjunctions:

Smith is going to speak about cars, because it's a subject he loves.

Smith is going to speak about cars, whether we want him to or not.

Again, we wouldn't expect to see these clauses joined by a semicolon:

Smith is going to speak about cars; because it's a subject he loves.

Smith is going to speak about cars; whether we want him to or not.

Mixed messages again.

The focus in these examples is on the second clause. That's always how it is. Imagine Hilary writing to her friends about the forthcoming conference. She reaches the end of the first clause:

Smith is going to speak about cars

She now has to decide how much she wants her next thought to be linked to this one. If she wants to make a totally separate remark, she will use a period. If she wants to show a balanced contrast, she will use a semicolon. If she wants to introduce a list, she will use a colon. And if she wants to immediately say more about Smith, his speaking, or his cars, she will use a comma – or no punctuation at all.

We must consider this last option, before moving on to the other. ‘No punctuation' is the ultimate marker of semantic tightness. With only word spaces left, the words between clauses now look the same as the words within the clauses.

Smith is going to speak about cars and Brown is going to speak about bikes.

If the clauses are short, this presents no problem to the reader, who can take in the structure of the sentence at a glance. But the usage has to be motivated, of course. Why would a writer
want
to bind the two clauses together so tightly? Well, imagine a scenario where Hilary rushes into a room in a state of great excitement, because she has just learned the exciting news. There's no pause. And if this excitement were to be represented in writing, there's no time for a comma.

Comma omission is most likely when the semantic link is one of ‘and'. It's a reflection of the normal way in which people narrate – a strategy that is found in young children from the age of three, when they first learn to coordinate sentences:

Mikey did go in the garden and – and – he did go on the swing and – and – and – he wented high up …

It's also the commonest way of linking sentences in the early stories that children write. And it continues into adult spoken narrative style: any story will contain more instances of
and
than any other conjunction. But if we start to be more subtle in our connecting, making a contrast using
but
or
and yet
, then writers usually insert a comma:

Smith is going to speak about cars, but Brown is going to speak about bikes.

It's less easy now to imagine someone rushing in and telling
this story (and thus, omitting the comma). The focus is now more meditative, on the contrast between the two events. The comma reinforces the meaning conveyed by
but
and draws our attention to it. Why go to the trouble of drawing the readers' attention to a semantic contrast if you're then going to make it more difficult for them to see the contrast (by omitting the comma)? Mixed messages again.

Any grammatical construction that binds two short clauses tightly together will motivate the omission of the comma. Look what happens when we leave out parts of the second clause, as here:

Smith is going to speak about cars and wants a room with a projector.

A comma is less likely, as we need to read in the subject of the first clause (
Smith
) and this forces the two parts together. We might find a comma if the writer saw the second clause as some kind of afterthought, in which case a dash would be a more effective way of conveying this meaning:

Smith is going to speak about cars – and wants a room with a projector.