Black Hippy Chick Day: When Punctuation is a Democracy

Last week we discussed the idea that commas are a democracy. You choose them on the basis of your pacing and clarity. Commas are often a matter of taste and of poetry. Periods can be a democracy, too. In poetry, omitting a period where one is needed can have a powerful effect. You can speed up your poem by placing sentences together without full stops. You can omit them entirely and rely on line breaks instead. Hell, I often use them incorrectly in my satire because pacing is as important in humour as it is in poems.

But not all punctuation is a democracy. Some punctuation marks are always necessary to make your writing clear. Apostrophe’s do not go in plural’s, otherwise your reader’s will become very confused and irritated. You can choose against quotation marks for speech, but the difference between its and it’s should always be correctly punctuated. Parentheses might be open to interpretation, but Oxford commas that provide clarity should always be placed.

Not all Oxford commas provide clarity, but that’s a discussion for a different day.

Dashes and colons matter and are best treated legalistically. That’s my opinion, anyway. Incredibly, there are quite a few opinions racing around about punctuation. That’s why we have separate style guides for every large media house—because there isn’t a single accepted way to handle every “rule.” It is reasonable, though, to obey some rules. Nobody’s going to tell you to leave periods out of your fiction. Not unless you have an excellent reason to do so.

The more creative your text, the more rules you can break. You don’t get to strew weird punctuation all over a legal letter, but you certainly do in a prose poem or piece of flash fiction. That doesn’t always make your choices right, of course. You can make as many errors with punctuation as you can with rhetoric. This is why the New Yorker has spent so many decades deciding how its writers should punctuate. If there was one law to rule them all, we’d never need to discuss this. Everyone would already know.

Punctuation has one universal law: Choose what you use for good reason. Never choose what you use out of apathy, laziness, or ignorance.