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i'm a great fan of the colon.

it’s friendlier than the full stop because it doesn’t say stop. wait here. i have something else to say in a moment. but right now i need you to halt. it says: hang on in there, the thought isn't quite finished: it continues, but remember to breathe. the colon is beautiful: small enough to not really obstruct the page, but noticeable enough to register. it doesn't drop below the baseline. i like that.

the comma, by comparison, is always a bit clumsy. it keeps dangling its tail, which is not elegant. i personally don't like the comma very much. if it were down to me we would use far less of it and simply allow ourselves to be carried along by the sentence for a while but most people find that exhausting and a little frightening because they feel they have nothing to hold on to then.

and the full stop is so very heavy. although it’s small, it has this density. it weighs in. it says you must. i don't like punctuation that says you must. i like punctuation that says you can; so if it weren't for the fact that like the comma the semi-colon dangles its inelegant tail below the baseline, i would also very possibly be able to be a fan of the semi-colon.

the semi-colon has a bit of an idiosyncrasy about it. it’s not quite one thing and not quite another. it’s half comma and half colon. which is why it’s called the half-colon. it could also be called half-comma, it wouldn’t make any difference. i think that’s almost a little endearing. it’s like a mongrel. it wants to be loved, but it knows it can’t quite be. it can be loved in an ‘all right then’ kind of way. that is in itself a little endearing. but i can't quite fall in love with it, not the way i can fall in love with the colon.

of course there is always the dash – but the dash loosens up the sentence so much. also it doesn't really know what it is. but it doesn’t not know what it is in a charming way (the way the semi-colon doesn’t know what it is, for example) it does so in a lazy way. it lies there, right in the middle of the sentence saying ‘i’m here now, i can’t be bothered to move’. but that isn’t really a very attractive thing to do. also, is it a hyphen or is it a thought? is it a typographical element or a grammatical one? i have nothing in itself against things that don't know what they are because in not knowing what you are there is an element of potential: of finding out what you can be. but the dash hasn't convinced me yet of its potential. it needs to do more than just lie there. so if ever possible i only use it to – a bit reluctantly – wedge something into a thought that otherwise would just be lost. for that, for holding up something that otherwise would just be lost two lazy dashes come in handy. without really noticing it they suddenly do something that they can do better than any other punctuation mark, and so they can be both at the same time, lazy and helpful. that’s in many ways ideal.

normally, though not always, and not just then, a bit earlier on, i avoid as much as i can the question mark and the exclamation mark too. they are both too much, really. how often do you really need to highlight the fact that you're asking a question. and if you have a point to make just make it, there's no need to signpost it. so to my mind these two too are almost superfluous. only sometimes it helps a little to emphasise that what you’ve just put down is actually a question, especially if it's a rhetorical question, since rhetorical questions aren't questions at all, so it sometimes helps to dress them up as questions. that's really almost the only good reason to use a question mark, and even then it isn’t always, is it...

i do like the ellipsis though i use it sparingly because not many people know what to make of it and i don’t want to expose it to their fury because it’s quite a gentle, unassuming, open-minded punctuation mark that gets a little insecure when questioned too forcefully. it needs looking after a bit. (and i quite like brackets, but these you have to use sparingly because, though useful, they are a bit ungainly. that doesn't make them bad, or give us reason to cast them out into the wilderness, of course, but i think it means that for aesthetic reasons we need to treat them with a degree of caution.)

i do like paragraphs!

(and that was a rare instance of an exclamation mark perhaps being justified. because i really like them, paragraphs. more and more. i never used to when i was very young, i almost eschewed them completely, but these days i really, really like them.)

as it happens
in my plays
i've now done away with
punctuation
almost altogether
and work with
paragraphs instead

paragraphs
are wonderful

they create a whole
different picture
on the page and they allow
the eye
to breathe

i am
a little bit
in love
with
paragraphs
though
when used in this way
they are really
lines
you could say, they are not
strictly
paragraphs
at all
which makes them even more interesting because they are
something
and something else
at the same time and the
something else
makes them
even better
than what they
were
before they became
what they are now

i like that

what i have a slight over-fondness for i think are maybe adverted commas. i may want to rein them in a bit. though they are useful, because they make things more relative. is a truth really a truth or is it a ‘truth’ they say. they say you know what a word means but allow for the possibility that you only ‘know’ what it means and that there is another way of ‘knowing’ what it ‘means’ too. but i realise they can become a bit annoying. so i may want to exercise, practise, some discipline when it comes to adverted commas. because like commas they also are a bit inelegant. they keep poking their tails above the topline and that is no more agreeable to the eye than what the commas do with theirs, and if it isn’t their tails that they poke then it’s their heads. and that doesn’t make things any better.

but at least in english we don’t have to, as they mostly do in german, use double adverted commas unless you’re actually quoting someone or something. because they are really ugly. they take up space on the line without doing anything more useful than single adverted commas and think they’re doing you a favour. they say “let me be ugly right here right now for you.” it’s the “for you” that irks me most. and they make other punctuation marks behave erratically. like the full stop. suddenly it doesn’t know should it go inside, where it strictly doesn’t belong, or should it go outside where it looks like it’s been locked out. so it suddenly feels out of place. what kind of treatment is that anyway, of your fellow punctuation marks, to just lock them out, and make them look like it too. that’s rude and unnecessary. no, i’m glad we don’t have to use them much. i think we do just fine with our single adverted commas. but i know i have to watch them a bit in my writing…

i think that more or less sums up my stance on punctuation.


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