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Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 5TZ, England
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4.V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published 1997
10 9 8 7 6
Copyright © R. L. Trask, 1997
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Set in
nVi/1 sVipt
Monotype Bembo
Typeset by Rowland Phocotypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any fonn of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Acknowledgements
To the Reader
Chapter i
Chapter 2
ix
viii
Why Learn to Punctuate?
i
The Full Stop, the Question Mark and
the Exclamation Mark
5
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
2.5
Chapter 3
The Full Stop
5
The Question Mark
8
The Exclamation Mark
9
A Final Point
11
Fragments
12
The Comma
13
13
17
19
21
33
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
The Listing Comma
The Joining Comma
The Gapping Comma
Bracketing Commas
Summary of C o m m a s
Chapter 4
The Colon and the Semicolon
4.1
The Colon
38
vi
The Penguin Guide to Punctuation
Table of Contents
vii
4.2
4.3
The Semicolon
Compared
45
41
9.6
9.7
9.8
9.9
9.10
9.11
Chapter 10
The Ellipsis
123
125
The Colon and the Semicolon
The Slash
124
Numerals, Fractions and Dates
Diacritics
Keyboard
129
132
The Other Marks on Your
Priority Among Punctuation Marks
Punctuating Essays and Letters
Titles and Section Headings
Footnotes
141
References to Published Work
Bibliography
Paragraphing
149
154
155
Chapter 5
5.1
5.2
5.3
Chapter 6
6.1
6.2
Chapter 7
7.1
7.2
Chapter 8
8.1
8.2
8.3
8.4
Chapter 9
9.1
9.2
9.3
9.4
9.5
The Apostrophe
Contractions
Unusual Plurals
Possessives
56
48
49
54
13 5
138
138
145
The Hyphen and the Dash
The Hyphen
The Dash
68
59
59
10.1
10.2
10.3
73
10.4
10.5
10.6
Capital Letters and Abbreviations
Capital Letters
Abbreviations
Quotation Marks
Quotations
Scare Quotes
94
107
109
no
73
85
94
Punctuating Letters
Bibliography
157
Quotation Marks and Direct
Other Useful Works on Punctuation
15 8
Index
159
Quotation Marks in Titles
Talking About Words
Miscellaneous
Italics
Boldface
Small Capitals
Parentheses
Square Brackets
113
117
118
119
122
113
x
The Penguin Guide to Punctuation
case what is wrong. All of the most frequent punctuation
mistakes are treated in this way.
The punctuation described here is the style which is cur-
rently the norm in Britain and the Commonwealth. Standard
American usage differs in a few respects; in these cases,
American usage is also described, but examples of specif-
ically American punctuation are always marked as follows:
(A). If you are writing expressly for an American audience,
you should follow the American norms.
The book also covers a few topics which are not strictly
aspects of punctuation, such as the proper use of capital letters,
of contractions and abbreviations and of diacritics. The last
chapter goes on to explain the proper way to handle titles,
footnotes, references and bibliographies, and it also covers
the punctuation of personal and business letters.
Since many people these days do most of their writing at
a keyboard, and especially with a word processor, this book
also explains the proper use of italics, boldface, small capitals
and the special characters available on a word processor.
Chapter 1
Why Learn to Punctuate?
Why should you learn to punctuate properly? After all, many
people have made successful careers without ever learning
the difference between a colon and a semicolon. Perhaps
you consider punctuation to be an inconsequential bit of
decoration, not worth spending your valuable time on. Or
perhaps you even regard punctuation as a deeply personal
matter - a mode of self-expression not unlike your taste in
clothes or music.
Well, punctuation is one aspect of written English. How
do you feel about other aspects of written English? Would
you happily write
pair
when you mean
pear,
because you
think the first is a nicer spelling? Would you, in an essay,
write
Einstein were a right clever lad, 'e were,
just because that's
the way people speak where you come from? Would you
consider it acceptable to write
proceed
when you mean
precede,
or vice versa, because you've never understood the difference
between them? Probably not - at least, I hope not.
Yet it is quite possible that you do things that are every
bit as strange and bewildering when you punctuate your
writing. Perhaps you use commas in what we shall soon see
2
The Penguin Guide to Punctuation
Why Learn to Punctuate?
3
are surprising places, merely because you think you might
pause there in speech. Perhaps you use semicolons where
you should be using colons, because you've never quite
understood the difference between them. Or perhaps, if
you're really committed to punctuation as self-expression,
you just stick in whatever punctuation takes your fancy,
because it's
your
piece of work, and so it ought to have
your
punctuation.
The problem with poor punctuation is that it makes life
difficult for the reader who needs to read what you've writ-
ten. That reader shouldn't have to make allowances for your
personal tastes in spelling and grammar: she expects to see
standard English spellings and standard English grammatical
forms. And the same is true for punctuation: she is most
unlikely to know what your personal theories of punctuation
are, and she won't be interested in them. She'll only be
interested in understanding what you've written, and she's
going to have trouble understanding it if it's badly punc-
tuated.
When we speak English, we have all sorts of things we can
use to make our meaning clear: stress, intonation, rhythm,
pauses — even, if all else fails, repeating what we've said.
When we write, however, we can't use any of these devices,
and the work that they do in speech must be almost entirely
handled by punctuation. Consequently, written English has
developed a conventional system of punctuation which is
consistent and sensible: every punctuation mark has one or
more particular jobs to do, and every one should be used
always and only to do those jobs. If your reader has to wade
through your strange punctuation, she will have trouble fol-
lowing your meaning; at worst, she may be genuinely unable
to understand what you've written. If you think I'm exag-
gerating, consider the following string of words, and try to
decide what it's supposed to mean:
We had one problem only Janet knew we faced
bankruptcy
Have you decided? Now consider this string again with dif-
fering punctuation:
We had one problem: only Janet knew we faced
bankruptcy.
We had one problem only: Janet knew we faced
bankruptcy.
We had one problem only, Janet knew: we faced
bankruptcy.
We had one problem only Janet knew we faced:
bankruptcy.
Are you satisfied that all four of these have completely differ-
ent meanings? If so, perhaps you have some inkling of how
badly you can confuse your reader by punctuating poorly.
What is the reader supposed to make of some feeble effort
like this?
* We had one problem only, Janet knew we faced
bankruptcy.
4
The Penguin Guide to Punctuation
(Remember, an asterisk is used to mark a sentence which is
poorly punctuated, or which is otherwise defective.)
Bad punctuation does not require an enormous effort to
put right. If you work carefully through this book, then,
providing you think carefully about what you're writing as
you write it, you will undoubtedly find that your punctuation
has improved a great deal. Your readers will thank you for it
ever after.
Chapter 2
The Full Stop, the Question Mark and the
Exclamation Mark
2.1 The Full Stop
The
full stop
(.), also called the
period,
presents few problems.
It is chiefly used to mark the end of a sentence expressing a
statement, as in the following examples:
Terry Pratchett's latest book is not yet out in paperback.
I asked her whether she could tell me the way to
Brighton.
Chinese, uniquely among the world's languages, is
written in a logographic script.
The British and the Irish drive on the left; all other
Europeans drive on the right.
Note how the full stops are used in the following article,
extracted from the
Guardian:
The opening of Ken Loach's film
Riff-Raff
in New York
casts doubt on Winston Churchill's observation that the
United States and Britain were two countries separated by
a common language. In what must be a first, an entire
British film has been given sub-titles to help Americans cut

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