2020; 160 pages. Full Title: Actually,
the Comma Goes Here: A Practical Guide to Punctuation. New Author? : Yes. Genres : Editing Reference; Punctuation
Reference; Non-Fiction. Overall Rating :
9*/10.
Punctuation.
Those pesky dots and squiggles, in all sorts of combinations, and straight lines of
various sizes, either sloping or horizontal.
They’re the bane of writers, editors, and proofreaders and are worse than misspelled words, because the latter can be checked easily enough.
Researching punctuation on the
internet often just makes things more confusing. Where one source demands that a comma be
used, another source forbids it. Heck,
they can’t even agree as to whether you should put one space or two after the
end of a sentence.
I suppose we could let the
British make the rules; after all, it is called “English”, not “American”. But they put single quotation marks around
direct speech, and us Yanks all know quotation marks come in pairs. And for goodness sake, they call a single dot
that closes out a sentence a “full stop”, everyone knows it’s called a
“period”.
There are a number of
punctuation books out there, but they mostly seem to take themselves too
seriously, adopting “it’s my way or the highway” stance. If only someone would write a punctuation
book that addresses all the various official “styles”, and lets us know when some bit
of punctuation is optional, and what our options in that case.
After all, fellow readers,
writers, and editors, overusing punctuation marks, you know, is worse, I’m
sure, than, underusing, them.
What’s To Like...
Actually, The
Comma Goes Here is divided into 15 chapters plus an introduction, with each one, for the most part, focusing on a different punctuation mark.
The chapters are:
00.
Introduction 08. The Exclamation Mark
01.
The Period 09. The Hyphen
02.
The Comma 10.
The Em and En Dash
03.
The Apostrophe 11. The
Parenthesis and the Bracket
04.
The Question Mark 12. The Ellipsis
05.
The Colon 13. The Slash
06.
The Semicolon 14.
Unusual Characters
07.
The Quotation Mark 15. The “Not Punctuation
Points”
The chapters usually have the structure of:
Introduction,
Uses
(and occasionally “Not-Uses”),
History
Lesson,
How
To Beat the Snobs, and once or twice:
Memory
Tips
The chapters are concise (the
book is only 160 pages long), but I found them extremely helpful. Frankly, 99% of the time I consult a
Punctuation website, it’s due to some “gray area” of grammar, which is what
this book focuses on.
My favorite chapters are given
above in pink, and by far my favorite part of the
chapters was How To Beat the Snobs. There’s also an extremely helpful chart in the back
comparing the various “House Styles” and how they differ. The Introduction and History sections are a
Trivia buff’s delight. I learned that
Kurt Vonnegut hated semicolons and Winston Churchill hated Hyphens; why we call
that “at sign” an Ampersand, that “sic”
is Latin for “sic erat scriptum”, and
that although an ellipse is three dots (not two
dots, five dots, or ten dots), yet sometimes it's grammatically correct to have four
dots in a row.
The tone of the book is
lighthearted, but don’t be misled: the text is packed with oodles of useful
punctuation information. If you’re
trying to figure out which grammar system to use, Lucy Cripps recommends the Chicago Manual of Style for most of us (the others being for specialized areas such as legal,
scientific, and journalism areas), then further customizing that to
our own tastes and for the sake of clarity, and calling it our “House Style”.
Her only caveat: BE CONSISTENT!!
Ratings…
Amazon:
4.5/5
based on 483 ratings and 90 reviews.
Goodreads: 4.38/5 based on 118
ratings and 53 reviews
Kewlest New Word ...
Noughties (n., British) : the decade from 2000 to
2009.
Others: Diple (n.).
Excerpts...
Fiction and nonfiction authors rely on the Chicago
Manual of Style (CMS), often with an additional, possibly contradictory,
house style sheet.
So when someone comes at you with their
“you’ve missed a comma, here” or “you’ve missed the hyphen in nonfiction,” you
can respond with divine calm that you are using a house style. For combatting snobbery, punctuation styles
give us excellent breathing space. (loc. 82)
When “email” was just coming out of
diapers, I insisted on using “e-mail,” as in “electronic-mail”. But others used Email, E-mail, email. Chaos.
By my reasoning that e- had to stay.
What would happen when eentertainment, eevent, eedition, eeducation, eemployee
came along? Just ridiculous. But, it seems, that is where we are
heading. The hyphen after e is no more. Maybe we, too, must eevolve and eembrace it. (loc. 1029)
Kindle Details…
Actually,
the Comma Goes Here currently sells for $8.99 at Amazon. This is apparently the only e-book authored by Lucy Cripps that's offered on Amazon. Here’s hoping she’s working on a sequel, maybe one on grammar and/or spelling variations.
“What happened to
the semicolon that broke the grammar laws?”
“It was given two consecutive sentences.” (loc. 758, and LOL)
There’s not much to quibble
about in Actually, the Comma Goes Here. Some reviewers were turned off by the book’s
“folksy” tone, but I thought it made the reading a more fun.
As you’d expect, the text is
remarkably clean, with just a single “hell” as far as cusswords go. And. although it's really nitpicky, I wish someday I find a grammar book
which includes a “Quiz” section so you can see how well you’ve comprehended the language rules.
But I quibble. I’m doing some copy-editing on the side right
now, and Actually, the Comma Goes Here was exactly the refresher course
I was hoping for. I intend to use it as my primary editing reference, especially
when it comes to those pesky commas.
9 Stars. We'll close with a couple of teasers: You might think the use of periods is pretty simple, but are national acronyms supposed to have them (U.S.A. and U.K.) or not (USA and UK)? Regarding the apostrophe, do two-digit decades require two apostrophes (‘70’s), one apostrophe (70’s or ‘70s), or none (70s)? You'll find the Actually, the Comma Goes Here.
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