Sticky Communication

Although an otherwise delightful teacher, the air quotes habit  was unhelpful and patronizing. We laughed behind her tie-dye shirted back.

Of course, you need to use quotation marks when directly quoting somebody. But you should use them to distinguish an usual spin on words only when you are certain your readers won’t understand and have rummaged through your brain in search or better words or techniques. How often does that happen? Close to never.

If you want some hilarious examples, check out this blog.

Semi-colons

My my first inclination would be to advise people to avoid semi-colons altogether. They are so often misused, overused and abused.

But then I remembered that semi-colons are helpful sometimes. For example, to replace the word “and” linking two related thoughts, i.e. MySpace is dead; Facebook rules.

Sometimes semi-colons work as super commas, separating words in a list that already has commas, i.e. The team is made up of Granny Moses, chief executive officer; Jed Clampett, chief operating officer; Jethro Bodine, chief financial officer; and so on.

I get the most agitated when people use semi-colons to string together too many thoughts. Stop. Start a new sentence instead. The shorter the sentence, the easier it is to understand.

Minimalist punctuaters make minimal use of semi-colons and other fancy marks.

Exclamation points are like swear words

Even more distressing are strings of exclamation points or single punctuation pogo sticks leaping out of every paragraph. Nothing will make your content look more amateur and sloppy. Think of a more creative way to express your excitement. The less often you use them, the more meaningful they will be.

Exclamation points are like swearing, best avoided or reserved for very special occasions when you need to deliver a strong, dramatic message.

Look out for apostrophes

Apostrophes are the most dangerous punctuation mark.

It’s bad enough that so many people get mixed up with possessives and contractions, as in “its” and “it’s.” More on that here. Cease and desist. Please.

But even grammatically minded people put the apostrophe at further risk by condoning its use with plurals in some cases. That includes the much-loved Grammar Girl .

Mignon Fogarty interprets what’s already in the rule books. But it’s time we take a stand against rules that add more confusion than clarity to language.

Take the example of the expression Mind your Ps and Qs. Alternatively, I could have written P’s and Q’s. But why add the silly frills when you understood the minimalist punctuation way?

With large and small numbers, followers of CP and most other style guides write out the numbers instead of using numerals, so apostrphes aren’t an issue. For example, you would write thousands of people instead of 1,000s of people. But even if you wrote 1,000s, the apostrophe would not be needed to get your meaning. 

Similarly, hits of the 1980s does not require a comma for people to understand.

I’m not going to insist that you never, ever use an apostrophe in a plural. But I am going to hiss the next time I see one when there was a perfectly understandable alternative.

The more apostrophes on plurals we allow to creep in, the more often we will be unsettled by flyers that proclaim “banana’s on sale.”

Apostrophes are the nuclear energy of punctuation. They can be used for the peaceful, practical purposes of indicating possessives and contractions. Even then they are tricky and must be handled with extreme care.

Unleashed as possible ways to indicate plurals, they can be a force of evil. By allowing them, we are opening the door to abuse and proliferation.

Let’s persuade the English writers of the world, which includes anyone who has written an email this year, to learn how to use them correctly with contractions and possessives before we mention that they might sometimes be allowed with plurals.

Let me say it again: Use only punctuation that helps your reader understand.

That’s all you need to remember. That’s minimalist punctuation.