Making a Point (20 page)

But printers were unimpressed, and the mark never became standard. However, it has received a new lease of life online, as we'll later see some people using it as way of showing an ironic or sarcastic question.

As a mark high up the punctuation hierarchy, the question mark, like the exclamation mark and the period, acts unambiguously as a sign of separation – to show where one sentence ends and the next begins. That's why a period was included within the symbol (and reflected in the term
question-stop
). This means it can be used without ambiguity even in a sequence of elliptical sentences:

Will the event be in London? in Tokyo? in Rio?

It should be noted, though, that in such a case the question mark loses its full force as a sentence separator. Normally the next sentence after a question mark begins with a capital letter. But not here. If we try to use capitals:

Will the event be in London? In Tokyo? In Rio?

we lose the structural parallelism between the three locations.

It's even more awkward if the list is presented vertically. Writers feel uncomfortable with all three of the options:

The first raises objections of visual clutter. The second makes it appear that there's something questionable about Berlin. And the third makes it look as if the locations are outside the scope of the question mark. In such a case, the only solution is to rephrase, and avoid the problem.

Other issues of punctuation usage regarding the question mark are all to do with what happens when a questioned sentence is included within another sentence. If it's an indirect question (reported speech), there's no problem: the mark isn't used.

She asked me where I had left the books.

Usage had vacillated during the seventeenth century, until Lindley Murray made it absolutely clear:

A point of interrogation should not be employed, in cases where it is only said a question has been asked, and where the words are not used as a question.

That was that. But what happens when the words
are
used as a question, and are included within another sentence?

If the question is placed inside the sentence, but not at the end, the answer is straightforward, as the parentheses or inverted commas (or both) express the separation well:

He wrote a comment ‘Is this your book?' on the cover.

He wrote a comment (Is this your book?) on the cover.

He wrote a comment (‘Is this your book?') on the cover.

But if the questioning utterance occurs at the end of the sentence, writers often wonder whether to add the sentence-ending mark that would be appropriate to the sentence as a whole:

(a) He wrote the comment ‘Is this your book?'.

(b) Did you see the comment ‘Is this your book?'?

(c) How on earth did he write the comment ‘Is this your book?'!

Usually, style guides recommend dropping the period in (a),
on the grounds that the period is already a part of the question mark. But some keep the double marking in (b) and (c), on the grounds that there are two meanings being expressed, each of which requires its own mark. People vacillate over (b). If the visual appearance is unacceptable, then writers are recommended to rephrase:

Did you see the words ‘Is this your book?' on the cover?

A similar situation occurs if the question mark is part of a title that is printed in italics. There's no problem when the title is a statement:

Did she sing
I'm singing in the rain
?

But there is a problem if it's a question:

Did she sing
Where have all the flowers gone?
?

Nobody is likely to tolerate the juxtaposition of two question marks in different fonts. It's at this point that authors and printers begin to weep, for there is no solution other than rephrasing. And there's no solution in handwriting either, unless we've mastered two (roman and italic) hands. And even if we have, would readers really notice the contrast?

This is an important general point. It isn't the case that punctuation can solve all the problems of graphic representation thrown up by the multifarious subjects that we want to write about. It isn't a perfect system. And an important aim of teaching is to draw students' attention to the places where the system breaks down, and to suggest ways around the difficulties.

Students also need to note that, as with exclamation marks, there are a number of specialized uses, such as the chess notations described in the previous chapter. We see
special uses of the question mark in computer programming and in Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) when they include a query string. This example, from the Shakespeare's Words website, tells us that someone has searched for Act 1 Scene 1 in Play Number 3:

http://www.shakespeareswords.com/Plays.aspx?Ac=1&SC=1&IdPlay=3

In linguistics, we see it as an alternative symbol for the glottal stop and also to mark a doubtfully acceptable sentence, such as
?I gave a nudge to John
.

It's also important to develop a sense of frequency norms to avoid any charge of excessive use. The issue isn't as dramatic as in the case of exclamation marks. On the whole, people don't use question marks repeatedly to the same extent. And multiple question marks (
Really???
) are much less commonly encountered than multiple exclamation marks, though of course we'll see a sprinkling in informal letter-writing and in excitable Internet situations. In the Pooh example on p. 30 there is a single vs double use conveying Christopher Robin's dawning realization of what Pooh has said. That's clever writing. But I haven't found many instances where the semantic distinction is so well motivated.

It's theoretically possible to have an entire text with every sentence ending in a question mark. At least, I used to think it was just a theoretical matter. Not any longer, after reading Padgett Powell's surreal
The Interrogative Mood
(2009). His book begins:

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to the potato? Should it still be Constantinople? …

Fifty pages on, he is still asking:

If you could be instantly fluent in a language you do not now speak, what language would it be? Can you change a tire by yourself? Have you ever petted a vole or a shrew? Do you partake of syrups?

Fifty pages more:

What is the loudest noise you have ever heard? Have you done any mountain climbing? Would you eat a monkey? What broke your heart?

And it ends, after 164 pages and a couple of thousand questions:

Are you leaving now? Would you? Would you mind?

‘If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel', comments novelist Richard Ford in the accompanying blurb, ‘it might look something like this.' And we do in fact see question marks being used artistically sometimes – such as in concrete poetry.

22

Semicolons; or not

Like exclamation marks, semicolons have had a bad press – but for different reasons. Several authors have taken against them, especially novelists, mainly I suspect because they are chiefly associated with the more complex sentences of formal writing, and are felt to be out of place when inserted into a free-flowing, informal dialogue. An often-quoted antagonist is Kurt Vonnegut. He writes, at the beginning of
Chapter 3
of
A Man without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush's America
(2005):

Here is a lesson in creative writing.

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not.

He wasn't kidding. He uses no semicolons in his book – until the very last chapter. There, at the end of a piece on the way our brains deal with imagination, we read a much less-quoted remark:

Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone, a face will just be a face.

And there, I've just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I
did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules.

Rules only take us so far. That sentence should be the motto for any work on punctuation.

There's a preference for short sentences, these days, when representing the colloquial character of everyday conversation, and when sentences do get longer, writers generally capture their rhythms by opting for dashes and ellipsis dots. Semicolons are no longer felt to do this job well. However, this is a modern response. Nineteenth-century novelists and short-story writers used them without a second thought. Here's Tom Jarndyce describing the horrors of going to law (
Chapter 5
of Charles Dickens's
Bleak House
):

‘For,' says he, ‘it's being ground to bits in a slow mill; it's being roasted at a slow fire; it's being stung to death with single bees; it's being drowned by drops; it's going mad by grains.'

And poets have always found it a useful mark, ever since it arrived in English during the later decades of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson took to it with enthusiasm, for example, as did John Donne.

Why was it so useful? Because it offered a way of conveying a meaning that had not been easily expressed before. When sentences are separated by periods, each topic comes across as semantically distinct. Two separate events are being reported in this summary of a conference schedule:

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

There is no relationship being suggested between Smith and Brown. But imagine now that Smith and Brown are colleagues
who have been working on a joint transport project, and they're each contributing to a report about their work. How do we maintain their independence, yet show they're in a relationship with each other that is different from the other conference speakers? The semicolon provides a solution:

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

The semicolon allows us to join two independent sentences together when we feel they are semantically linked in some way. It is, in short, a device of coordination. And as such, we can think of its primary function as being the punctuation equivalent of the main coordinating conjunction,
and
.

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

We'll often see sentences like that, with
and
linking the two constructions (
clauses
). But we'll also see them written like this:

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

Why the comma? It helps us to avoid a miscue. As we read, we don't actually know what's going to follow the
and
. It might be another linked noun:

Smith is going to speak about cars and trucks …

The comma makes it clear that the first clause is finished, and that what follows is going to be another clause.

So that's the essential choice the punctuation system gives us: semantically independent sentences vs semantically linked sentences. And there are only these two choices. The
meaning of the colon is very different, as we'll see in the next chapter. And a comma is ruled out. We cannot write:

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

This (sometimes called a ‘comma splice') would make the reader think there was more to come, in the form of a list – a really bad miscue. It is, however, a common punctuation error, often unnoticed while we're writing, but usually obvious if we take the trouble to read aloud what we've written.

Once we see that the role of the semicolon is to unite and divide at the same time, we can see how it can be used to show a relationship between units other than complete sentences. Let's stay with
Bleak House
. In
Chapter 6
we see Dickens uniting (yet keeping separate) elliptical sentences:

Harold Skimpole loves to see the sun shine; loves to hear the wind blow; loves to watch the changing lights and shadows; loves to hear the birds, those choristers in Nature's great cathedral.

And in
Chapter 8
, we see Dickens linking phrases in his description of Chesney Wold:

As to the House itself, with its three peaks in the roof; its various-shaped windows, some so large, some so small, and all so pretty; its trellis-work, against the south front for roses and honey-suckle, and its homely, comfortable, welcoming look.

This is where the semicolon comes into its own. It allows a huge amount of detail to be compressed into a single sentence. People admire Dickens's atmospheric sense of detail, the way he paints a vivid picture in a single sentence. The semicolon is one of the devices that enables him to do it.

The example also shows how the semicolon operates in the punctuation hierarchy, lying between the period and the comma. The same effect can't be achieved by relying on commas alone. Indeed, if we do that, the result is increasing confusion:

As to the House itself, with its three peaks in the roof, its various-shaped windows, some so large, some so small, and all so pretty, its trellis-work, against the south front for roses and honey-suckle, and its homely, comfortable, welcoming look.

We need to breathe, to assimilate the different views as Dickens makes our eyes travel over the house; and the semicolon shows us where.

A similar organizational function appears when we look upwards in the hierarchy, towards the period. Note what is going on in this extract, also from
Chapter 8
, as Mr Jarndyce explains the workings of the law to Esther:

Equity sends questions to Law, Law sends questions back to Equity; Law finds it can't do this, Equity finds it can't do that; neither can so much as say it can't do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the Apple Pie.

This is rhetorically very complex, but perfectly clear. And its clarity comes from the way the semicolon links not individual sentences, but pairs of sentences. Again, if the commas and semicolons were replaced by periods, the effect would be totally different. It's not that the irony is lost; simply that the reader has to work harder in order to see it:

Equity sends questions to Law. Law sends questions back to Equity. Law finds it can't do this. Equity finds it can't do that.

This is always the best way to discover the function of the semicolon: replace it by something else, and see what happens.

To summarize: the semicolon allows us to see more clearly the structure of a complex sentence, especially one which is packed full of detail. It takes some of the load off the comma. There's nothing semantically confusing about the sequence of adjectives and nouns in the following sentence; but the second version is much easier to read:

The menu offered us orange or apple juice, a boiled, fried, or poached egg, toast, and tea or coffee.

The menu offered us orange or apple juice; a boiled, fried, or poached egg; toast; and tea or coffee.

Note that, in the interest of preserving the parallelism between the items in the list as a whole, we sometimes find the semicolon closing an item that consists of just one word.

The trick, in using the semicolon, is to maintain grammatical parallelism. The semicolon happily links two sentences, or two phrases, or even two words – but they are always two units of the same grammatical kind. It begins to feel uncomfortable when we try to make it link units at different levels:

The menu offered us orange or apple juice; a boiled, fried, or poached egg; toast; and I had coffee.

The reason is that
I had coffee
is a separate topic. It's no longer an item on a menu list. As such, it would be better presented as an afterthought, using a dash or ellipsis dots:

The menu offered us orange or apple juice; a boiled, fried, or poached egg; toast – and I had coffee.

It's often been reported that the semicolon is going out of fashion, and the evidence (from the study of large collections of written material) does support a steady drop in frequency during the twentieth century. (They're much more common in British English than American English.) A typical finding is to see that 90 per cent of all punctuation marks are either periods or commas, and semicolons are just a couple of percent. The figure was much higher once. The semicolon had its peak in the eighteenth century, when long sentences were thought to be a feature of an elegant style, heavy punctuation was in vogue, and punctuation was becoming increasingly grammatical. The rot set in during the nineteenth century, when the colon became popular, and took over some of the semicolon's functions. The economics of the telegraph (the shorter the message, the cheaper) fostered short sentences. And today it has virtually disappeared from styles where sentences tend to be short, such as on the Internet. Some online style manuals are unequivocal. For example, Michael Miller writes in
Web Words That Work: Writing Web Copy That Sells
(2013,
Chapter 14
):

you don't want to include more than a single thought in any one sentence; social media does not welcome such complexity. Avoid semicolons, dashes, and all other enablers of compound sentences. If you have two clauses or thoughts to get across, put them in two separate sentences.

There are many such cautions expressed these days. We have to take them with a pinch of salt, though, as the writers often break their own rules. Note the two thoughts separated by a semicolon in the above quotation, for instance. But such manuals are nonetheless influential.

It may be less fashionable than it was, but the semicolon still offers a unique semantic option: conveying a closer relationship than is expressed by the period. The writer is telling the reader: I want you to see that these thoughts relate to each other. And when we put it like that, we can see how easy it is for the mark to be misused. There's a limit to what the reader can take on board at any one time (that is, in any one sentence). We have no problem seeing a semantic relationship between two linked units, or even three; but if a sentence contains four or more, the strain on our comprehension is considerable. We are being asked to see the connection between too many separate thoughts, and we simply cannot do it.

This is one reason why I find it difficult to read certain authors who rely on the semicolon, such as William Hazlitt. Here's an example from his essay ‘On Poetry in General' (1818). It's clear, from the use of the colon after the opening clause, that he sees everything which follows to be semantically linked, but it's impossible for us to maintain a coherent sense of connection as we read on:

The storm of passion lays bare and shows the rich depths of the human soul: the whole of our existence, the sum total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we dread, is brought before us by contrast; the action and reaction are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intimate participation with the antagonist world of good; makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs at the heart-strings; loosens the pressure about them; and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force.

Summarize that sentence! We follow the movement of the thought well enough, but any semantic role the semicolon
might have had is soon lost, and we end up treating the mark as if it had no more value than indicating a slightly longer pause than a comma.

The same sort of uncertainty sometimes surfaces in modern novels. Here's the opening paragraph of Evelyn Waugh's
Brideshead Revisited
(in its 1959 revision):

‘I have been here before,' I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

Waugh seems to be trying to convey a stream of memories, but it's difficult to see a principle behind the use of the semicolons to do it, as opposed to using periods after
said
and
summer
and a dash or ellipsis dots after
before
. The semicolons are performing different functions in the same sentence – never a good practice.