Comma chameleon
Hello, hello, hello. Hello? Hello! Imagine saying those different versions of hello aloud on a train; your audience is a group of passengers you’ve never met before and you’ve got to convey the meaning of that little word to them. Somehow you have to show that each hello, or group of hellos in the case of the first three, is different and of course you’ll act them out differently because of the punctuation. The commas will tell you one way of saying the word, the question mark another and the exclamation mark another.
Think of all the things punctuation can do. A full stop puts the brakes on. Just like that one just did. A series of. Full stops. Can give a sentence. A kind of. Menacing quality. Commas can give rhythm and nuance to a sentence, like this: The sleet swirled, twirled and whirled, giving the whole street, or at least the bits of it you could still see, the air of a shaken snow globe. Question marks hang around at the end of the line like aggressive coat-hangers, making sure you’re asking for the information that you need, and exclamation marks are like little balloons popping and exploding many of the possibilities of the end of a particular sentence.
I’m a big fan of all punctuation marks, but the two I like best are the semicolon and the ellipsis. The semicolon is, in my humble opinion, the undisputed queen of punctuation; the ellipsis, on the other hand, is an international mark of mystery…
I’ve been told off by editors and proofreaders in the past for overusing the semicolon; they say that I should just end the sentence with a full stop; then I can start a new thought. I disagree with this; for me the semicolon gives a sentence subtlety and the rhythms of speech. Semicolons help authors to write authentic dialogue, I believe; as does the odd colon: well, it’s a way to march through a paragraph, isn’t it?
The ellipsis, though… the ellipsis. Those three footballs rolling through a sentence like a cliff-hanger in a novel. What on earth is going to happen next…? The ellipsis will tell you…
The thing about ellipses is that you can’t use them too often because, like anchovies, they get a bit strong… they take over the entire sentence, reducing it to… or…
The most authentic Yorkshire punctuation I can come up with is a double-size full stop for the decisive way elderly Yorkshire men end their sentences. “And I’ll tell thi that for nowt.” Somehow it seems to me that you need a giant full stop to emphasise that ending; maybe a full stop the size of a football, crowding out everything else on the page. That would do it.
Or would it…