Plain Words (32 page)

(2) To
introduce an explanation, amplification, paraphrase, particularisation or correction of what immediately precedes it:

They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril …

… overhead the far-ranging Catalina air-boats soared—vigilant, protecting eagles in the sky.

… the end of our financial resources was in sight—nay, had actually been reached.

(3) To indicate that the construction of the sentence, as begun, will be left unfinished (grammarians call this
anacoluthon
):

But when you go to other countries—oddly enough I saw a message from the authorities who are most concerned with our Arab problem at present, urging that we should be careful not to indulge in too gloomy forecasts.

(4) To gather up the subject of a sentence when it is a very long one; after the long loose canter of the subject you need to collect your horse for the jump to the verb:

The formidable power of Nazi Germany, the vast mass of destructive munitions that they have made or captured, the courage, skill and audacity of their striking forces, the ruthlessness of their centralised war-direction, the prostrate condition of so many great peoples under their yoke, the resources of so many lands which may to some extent become available to them—all these restrain rejoicing and forbid the slightest relaxation.

Similarly with the jump from the verb:

I would say generally that we must regard all these victims of the Nazi executioners in so many lands, who are labelled
Communists and Jews—we must regard them just as if they were brave soldiers who die for their country on the field of battle.

(5) To introduce a paradoxical, humorous or whimsical ending to a sentence:

He makes mistakes, as I do, though not so many or so serious—he has not the same opportunities.

The full stop is an exception to the rule that ‘as few stops should be used as will do the work'. I have no advice to give about it except to say that it should be plentifully used: in other words, to repeat the advice I have already given that sentences should be short. I am not, of course, suggesting that good prose never contains long ones. On the contrary, the best prose is a judicious admixture of the long with the short. Mark Twain, in 1890, after advising the young author to write short sentences as a rule, added:

At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure that there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he is done with it, it won't be a sea-serpent, with half its arches under the water, it will be a torchlight procession.

If you can write long sentences that you are satisfied really merit that description, by all means surprise and delight your readers with one occasionally. But the shorter ones are safer.
*

Always use a full stop to separate into two sentences statements between which there is no true continuity of thought. For example,
and
is too close a link in these sentences:

There are 630 boys in the school and the term will end on April 1st.

As regards Mr Smith's case a report was made on papers AB 340 and I understand he is now dead.

In
Modern English Usage
Fowler makes an elaborate study of the hyphen. He begins engagingly by pointing out that ‘a superfluous hair-remover' can only mean a hair-remover that nobody wants, and he proceeds to work out a code of rules for the proper use of the hyphen. He admits that the result of following his rules ‘will often differ from current usage'. But, he adds, ‘that usage is so variable as to be better named caprice'. In a style book of 1937 produced for the Oxford University Press,
Manuscript & Proof
, John Benbow strikes a similar note when he writes of a ‘great twilight zone' in the use of hyphens, and says, ‘If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad'.

I have no intention of taking hyphens seriously. Those who wish to do so I leave to Fowler's eleven columns. If I attempted to lay down any rules I should certainly go astray, and give advice
not seemly to be followed. I will attempt no more than to give a few elementary warnings.

(1) Do not use hyphens unnecessarily. If, for instance, you must use
overall
as an adjective (though this is not recommended) write it like that, and not
over-all
. You need a hyphen to avoid puzzling your reader whether
coop
is something to put a hen in, or a profit-sharing association (
co-op
); but the word
cooperative
can be understood without, and is often written this way. Where you do split a word with a hyphen, make sure you split it at the main break.

(2) To prevent ambiguity a hyphen should be used in a compound adjective (e.g.
first-class
,
six-inch
,
copper-coloured
). The omission of a hyphen between ‘government' and ‘financed' in the following sentence throws the reader on to a false scent:

When government financed projects in the development areas have been grouped …

But remember that words forming parts of compound adjectives when they precede a noun may stand on their own feet when they follow it, and then they need not be hyphenated. A ‘second-hand car' needs a hyphen, but ‘the car was second hand' does not. There must be hyphens in ‘the balance-of-payment difficulties' but not in ‘the difficulties are over the balance of payments'.

Note
. Gowers's advice here is not wrong, but nowadays many writers will do without the hyphen in a compound adjective before a noun if the resulting sentence remains unambiguous (‘When I went to the station to buy a first class ticket there was a tin pot dictator managing the queue'). If this is your habit, you must stay alert to the possibility of a misunderstanding. The idea was recently mooted that when universities weighed up applicants for places, pupils from ‘low-performing schools' should be given an advantage over pupils from better schools. For want of a hyphen
,
one newspaper produced the following absurd account
of the proposal: ‘Exam board suggested awarding bonus points to low-performing school students who get top grades'.

NB when adverbs that end in
ly
are used in descriptive compounds, they do not need a hyphen (‘a strongly worded complaint'; ‘a densely argued report'). ~

(3) Avoid as far as possible the practice of separating a pair of hyphenated words, leaving a hyphen in mid-air. To do this is to misuse the hyphen (whose proper function is to link a word with its immediate neighbour) and it has a slovenly look. The saving of one word cannot justify writing ‘where chaplains (whole- or part-time) have been appointed'. This should be, ‘where chaplains have been appointed, whole-time or part-time'.

I have read nothing more sensible about inverted commas than this:

It is remarkable in an age peculiarly contemptuous of punctuation marks that we have not yet had the courage to abolish inverted commas … After all, they are a modern invention. The Bible is plain enough without them; and so is the literature of the eighteenth century. Bernard Shaw scorns them. However, since they are with us, we must do our best with them, always trying to reduce them to a minimum. (H. A. Treble and G. H. Vallins,
An
ABC
of English Usage
)

I have only two other things to say on this vexatious topic.

The first question is whether punctuation marks (including question and exclamation marks) should come before or after the inverted commas that close a quotation. This has been much argued, with no conclusive result. It does not seem to me of great practical importance, but I feel bound to refer to it, if only because a correspondent criticised me for giving no guidance on
the matter in an earlier edition of this book, and accused me of being manifestly shaky about it myself. The truth is that there is no settled practice governing this most complicated subject. Pages were written about it by the Fowlers in
The King's English
, but their conclusions are by no means universally accepted.

Most books on English advise that stops should be put in their logical positions. But what does that mean? There are two schools of thought. The first is exemplified, perhaps shakily, in this book, and is summarised below. Let us take this as our quotation:

I guarantee that the parcel will be delivered, and on time.

If this is quoted as a free-standing sentence, its own stops remain inside the inverted commas:

‘I guarantee', he wrote, ‘that the parcel will be delivered,' adding emphatically, ‘and on time.'

But if it is quoted as part of a longer sentence that embraces it, and the two end together with the same stop, the stop goes outside:

He wrote: ‘I guarantee that the parcel will be delivered, and on time'.

This applies even to a question mark:

How could he possibly write afterwards, ‘Why did you believe my guarantee'?

But if the two stops are different, a question mark trumps a full stop:

How could he possibly write afterwards, ‘I meant every word of it'?

He dared to write afterwards, ‘Why did you believe my guarantee?'

The second school of thought will not have this. Its adherents, including many publishers, dislike the look of stops outside inverted commas if they can possibly be put inside. But we need not concern ourselves here with questions of taste in printing. The drafter of official letters and memoranda is advised to stick to the principle of placing the punctuation marks according to the sense.
*

The second thing I have to say on this topic is a repeat of my earlier warning against over-indulgence in the trick of encasing words or phrases in inverted commas to indicate that they are being used in a slang or technical or facetious or some other unusual sense. This is a useful occasional device; instances may be found in this book. But it is a dangerous habit.

Note
. Many people would no doubt still agree with Gowers that inverted commas can be taken to indicate a facetious or an unusual sense. But anyone in this camp is at risk of being disconcerted by the numerous other people who now use inverted commas merely for emphasis. The danger is illustrated by an article on ‘the metrics of recruiting':

With the role of human resources shifting from service and administration to strategic planning partner, we need to take on more accountability for how we impact the success of the business. The biggest impact we can make is on the ‘human' resources the organization employs to maintain the business.

The phrase
human resources
is used here first to refer to the specialists who manage an entire workforce, and second, to the workers themselves. In the second instance, in an attempt to
emphasise that the resources to be ‘impacted' are of the living, breathing kind, the word
human
has been put in inverted commas. Yet the effect on those who read inverted commas to mean ‘please note that I am using this word facetiously' will be the reverse of the one intended: to them it must seem that the workers are being dismissed—in an offensively conspiratorial manner—as somehow
less
than human. (Either way, the meaning of the second sentence appears to amount to little more than ‘In order to do our job we should do our job'.) ~

Letters, reports, memoranda and other documents would be unreadable if they were not divided into paragraphs, and much has been written on the art of paragraphing. But little of it helps the ordinary writer; the subject does not admit of precise guidance. The chief thing to remember is that, although paragraphing loses all point if the paragraphs are excessively long, the paragraph is essentially a unit of thought, not of length. For the sake of clarity, every paragraph should be homogeneous in subject matter, and sequential in treatment of it. If a single sequence of treatment of a single subject goes on so long as to make an unreasonably long paragraph, it may be divided into more than one. But you should not do the opposite, and combine into a single paragraph passages that have not this unity, even though each by itself may be below the average length of a paragraph.

The purpose of a parenthesis is ordinarily to insert an illustration, explanation, definition, or additional piece of information of any sort, into a sentence that is logically and grammatically complete without it. A parenthesis may be marked off by commas, dashes
or brackets. The degree of interruption of the main sentence will vary. Explanatory words that parallel the subject can be almost imperceptible:

Mr Smith, the secretary, read the minutes.

But the interruption may be the violent one of a separate sentence complete in itself:

A memorandum (six copies of this memorandum are enclosed for the information of the board) has been issued to management committees.

Parentheses should be used sparingly. Their very convenience is a reason for fighting shy of them. They enable writers to dodge the trouble of arranging their thoughts properly. But a writer's thoughts are left badly arranged at the expense of the reader, especially if the thought that has been spatchcocked into the sentence forms an abrupt break in it, or a lengthy one, or both. The second of the two examples just given shows an illegitimate use of the parenthesis. The writer had no business to keep the reader waiting for the verb by throwing in a parenthesis that would have been put better as a separate sentence. The following examples are even worse: