The Right Kind of Stops – Importance of Using Correct Punctuation

By Hansini Gunasekara

Alright, no beating around the bush this time, because we are getting into some serious business. Punctuation! I’m pretty sure all of us have been called ‘lousy punctuation users’ at one point or the other.  Well, I have and believe me, it’s not fun to be called that after years of writing and endless torture at grammar lessons in school. Learning how to use those commas, periods and exclamation marks in the right places is like learning how to style your hair. No one tells you that hairspray stinks or that curlers don’t work on straight hair, you’ve got to learn it by yourself. Using the right punctuations is also like that; simple, yet a long process of making mistakes and correcting them along the way.

So, what exactly is important in using these marks at the right places? I mean, they are just tiny spots or lines, aren’t they? That’s what I believed until this happened. 

- Dan performed his favorite song minutes after he was shot dead.

- Dan performed his favorite song; minutes after, he was shot dead. 

The wordings of the above sentences are the same. But when you read them, you clearly understand that there is a massive difference in their meanings. Here’s another I’ve come across. 

Dear John, 

I have no feelings now. For other men, I yearn. For you, I will shed no more tears. When we are apart, I can be happy forever. Will you please let me be? 

Yours, Gloria 

Dear John,

I have no feelings now, for other men. I yearn for you. I will shed no more tears when we are apart; I can be happy forever. Will you please let me be yours? 

Gloria 

British author Lynne Truss once said that if people stopped paying attention to punctuation, it would be the death of all poems and prose. We can imagine what Shakespeare would have sounded like, if it wasn’t for all his semicolons and commas. 

The secret of punctuations lies in the voice inflexion patterns.  When we speak, we pause after certain words and stress on others; if not, the listener would be left utterly confused. Writing is even trickier. Since we may not be with the reader, an entirely wrong message would go across if wrong punctuation is used. In some parts of the world, this would bring you death sentence. 

Did you know that there is a difference between a slash/stroke and a solidus? I didn’t, until I became serious with Writum. Both look very similar – lines inclined to the right, but a slash is used in place of a hyphen or an en-dash (oh, I know this!) to represent a strong joint between words or parts of a sentence. It is also commonly used to replace “or” and in between lines of poems/ prose. A solidus on the other hand, a slightly thinner version of the slash, is used to denote a shilling. Well, yes, a solidus isn’t important, unless you are writing about British Commonwealth before decimalization. 

Did you also know that there were four different varieties of brackets? Namely, they are parenthesis, square brackets, curly brackets and chevrons (angle brackets) and are used to denote surprisingly different things. Honestly, I still don’t fully get why it’s such big a deal. They are all used to interject text that aren’t supposed to be in the main piece of writing, aren’t they? However, unfortunate for us writers, they cannot be used randomly. Parenthesis is used like the typical brackets, to put information that isn’t supposed to be in the main sentence and square brackets are for things added by people other than the original author. 

Kelly said (while Jen was sprawling on the ground looking for the missing diamond), in a serious voice, “I don’t think he [the artist] would mind”

Here’s a tip. It is known that when writers wish to be funny, they end their sentences with exclamations, because they add a tone of excitements to the sentence. 

- I want to be a billionaire.

- I want to be a billionaire! 

(I really don’t think the speaker of sentence 1 means it)

These are a few lessons I’ve learned along the way and honestly, I have never used guillemets in my writing and I don’t know how to. The secret lies behind knowing how to use the basic punctuation marks (commas, full stops, quotations, colons, semi-colons, hyphens, parenthesis, exclamations and question marks) in the right places, so that your written sentence would make perfect sense, like it would, if it was spoken.