# Punctuating backwards



## Olly Buckle (Nov 28, 2017)

I have been reading things about punctuation and I realised that they all start at the same place, well they would, people who are into punctuation are like that; orderly. 
Most people understand the full stop fairly well and find a discourse on it a boring start, so I am taking things in a different order.

Dates
Order, when I talk about a date I do so in order of day/month/year, it seems natural to me, but no doubt it seems natural to an American to express a date in order of month/day/year. This can be confusing if put in numerals, 9/11 or 11/9? For clarity I suggest writing out the month part, abbreviating the longer months. It won’t matter how you write it, Sept 11th or 11th Sept. Of course there are some dates so well known in one system it would be foolish to try and express them otherwise. Note I did not punctuate the abbreviation of September. The punctuation of dates is becoming less and less common. 18 April,1775, with a comma either side of the year, would have been normal at the time on both sides. August to January abbreviate well, March to July do not need it

Much of this may not seem like punctuation, to most people punctuation is a series of marks, but think of it as showing people the way, like starting a new sentence with a capital letter.

Abbreviations
Having mentioned abbreviations in the example above I will go with them for the next bit. An abbreviation is shortening that is still pronounced in the same way as the full form. For example, Mr., said ‘mister’, Dr., said ‘doctor’. These are the ‘everyday’ abbreviations that ‘everyone’ knows, on the whole you will know to capitalise titles and put full stops after them, though fashions in such things change, and my general advice would be to steer clear of abbreviations otherwise

If you do use them it is a good idea to make sure your readers know what your abbreviations mean. That will in part depend on who your readers are, geographically and intellectually. Writing for ‘European Defence monthly’, no need to explain who NATO are; writing for ‘Pacifists down under’ and it would pay to write, ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)’, the first time and use NATO thereafter. There are other ways of doing it, such as footnotes, but it is the principle that counts, no point writing it if the reader does not understand it.

As I said a couple of paragraphs back ‘fashions change’. When I was a boy I was taught to write an address, There had to be a full stop after the title; Mr. Mrs. Miss., and there was a comma after the house number and at the end of each line. Similarly NATO would have been N.A.T.O. 

There are a whole bunch of Latin abbreviations in common use, e.g.; ‘i.e., vis., ibid.’, etc. Be careful when you use them. Apart from the fact that it is probably clearer to write out the English form it is also easy to make errors such as using i.e. when you mean e.g., or ect. for etc. If you do use it, make sure you have it right. The other point is that whilst you may know all the meanings and never muddle them your reader may not. If you write “For example; ‘in other words, namely, from, the same source,’ and so forth...”, you will be using very little extra effort and paper, be more widely understood, and appear more elegant; some others and their meanings are:-
Sc. Which means
c. Approximately; used in the context of a date and usually meaning within five years of it.
Cf. Compare
Et al. And others
Note there is no full stop after et in et al. It is a complete word, as is the S in Harry S Truman; that was his given name, not the initial of it. This is another case where fashion has changed, nowadays the unpunctuated form does not look out of place, very few would write O. J. Simpson as was once the style.


There are special cases where conventions apply, if you are writing a recipe 4oz would be the normal way to write four ounces, a mathematician would write 5kg not 5kg. or 5kgs.
If you do finish a sentence with a full stop after an abbreviation, do not add another to finish the sentence, the single stop will serve both functions.


Contractions
Do you remember I said “An abbreviation is shortening that is still pronounced in the same way as the full form.”? Well a contraction is a shortening that has its own pronunciation because some letters are missing, for example;
We’ll; we will
They’ve; they have
Can’t; can not
I am sure you can think of a few more, but one to take note of, it’s, short for ‘it is’. When we get there you will see that ‘ can also be used to indicate possession, so people often mistake it’s (it is) for its (belonging to). Yes, it’s to do with possessing, but it’s its, a complete word, no letters missing. Work that out and hopefully you will remember to ask yourself if it could be ‘it is’ when you write, it’s. Yes, correct :  No, then it should be, its.


Note this in view of what I said in abbreviations about fashions changing
Sha’n’t for ‘shall not’ 
The ‘ symbol indicates a missing letter or letters, and there are two places where something is missing, so that is formally correct, but I reckon there is a growing tendency to write it with one; shan’t, spellcheck recognises this version. The contraction of ‘she would have’ is more problematical. She’d’av? She’dav? Shed’av? Sheds tend to be at the bottom of the garden, the other version looks messy to modern eyes; unless it is an essential bit of dialogue I would advise writing out in full, like the lesser known abbreviations.

I have posted here rather than in Writing Discussion as I would welcome crit before continuing with this project.


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## escorial (Dec 31, 2017)

i've read two books on grammar over the years and took little from them...so after getting through this i did think i could read this again...not so much for the information which is the core of the piece but for me it was about the systematic approach to define a meaning a reason for using something the writer considers the correct use...but it felt more like this is how you apply your knowledge on the subject matter and can appreciate why others may differ in their approach to yours...not the most exciting topic but still you do have a knack of making the subject matter secondary in an abstract way...


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## Olly Buckle (Dec 31, 2017)

Thanks, that is most encouraging. I shall move on to some of those little marks  Unlike the punctuation experts I am determined to finish with the full stop, well it seems right and natural to me!

PS, that is exactly the sort of crit. I am looking for, is it readable, or does the mind start to drift after ten lines? That's the problem I have with most grammars.


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## escorial (Dec 31, 2017)

readable first an content second...stuff like do you remember i said just gave it that charming appeal...contradictions part was my fav bit but as a whole it all worked so well....


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## Jack of all trades (Dec 31, 2017)

I didn't make it beyond the first paragraph because the punctuation was different than what I would choose.

How I would punctuate it, for what it's worth : 

"I have been reading things about punctuation and I realised that they all start at the same place. Well ,they would. People who are into punctuation are like that -- orderly.
Most people understand the full stop fairly well and find a discourse on it a boring start, so I am taking things in a different order."


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## Olly Buckle (Jan 1, 2018)

To me that 'books on punctuation start in the same place because they are written by similar people' seems one concept. 'Well, they would' is an incomplete concept, it begs the question 'Who would what?' and is therefore included in the sentence that tells you that, as a sub-clause.
The semi colon is used incorrectly here, it is true, it should seperate complete sentences that are closely related, and 'orderly' is not a complete sentence, but neither is it a broken off sentence like - well you know. (sorry, I only seem to have the hyphen on my keyboard, no dash).
I suppose it could be taken as a strong interruption - which calls for a dash. I read it as a contraction of the full sentence, 'They are the sort of people who are orderly', I probably should have used a comma in that case.

I am sorry you couldn't bring yourself to read on, but thank you for the comment.


PS, 'Different than' always jars with me, though I understand it is now acceptable in American English. May I suggest that 'Different than what' is excessive, try reading it without the 'what'. My Mother was an English teacher, and I can still remember her correcting me by saying 'Don't you mean different from that which what ...?'   Thank you for bringing back that memory of her, she was a lovely woman.


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## Jack of all trades (Jan 1, 2018)

How to do home repair is one concept. Entire books have been devoted to it. But those books are still broken into parts : chapters, paragraphs and sentences. Multiple sentences can, and do, revolve around a single concept.

If one is going to write about punctuation, one should make sure all punctuation is correct. How can a reader take what's said seriously if the, presumably less knowledgeable, reader sees questionable punctuation?


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## Olly Buckle (Jan 3, 2018)

Jack of all trades said:


> If one is going to write about punctuation, one should make sure all punctuation is correct. How can a reader take what's said seriously if the, presumably less knowledgeable, reader sees questionable punctuation?



That is very true, I thoroughly take the point, however in another sense all punctuation is questionable to some degree or another, the eighteenth century concept of a single correct punctuation or grammar is out of the window in today's world. That is not to say that things can't be wrong, of course they can, but if generally accepted enough they 'become right'. I immediately think of 'different than', it sounds completely wrong to me, but since I questioned it I keep finding examples in print in quite respectable sources.

I am probably a bit old fashioned in the length of sentences, I am a bit old after all  

I remember reading a letter from Pepys to a ship's Captain (1660's) in which he made a single sentence, filled with brackets and sub-clauses, take up a page and a half (In a printed book, heaven knows how many pages in the original ms version!). The modern tendency seems to be, 'See the necessary components. Make a separate sentence.'


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