Punctuation

New Year: is it capitalised or not?

~ Charlie Hankers

It’s the most capitalised time of the year, with plenty of Eves and Days and News to contend with, and as you browse the internet and the shop fronts, you’ll no doubt see plenty of interpretations of how to spell them all. To be fair, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day tend to be capitalised properly, but it’s New Year’s Day that causes confusion, probably with good reason. Do all three words start with a capital letter? Are any words capitalised? And that about that apostrophe? Here’s your guide.

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My top twelve English corrections

~ Charlie Hankers

English is always changing, so today’s common corrections can easily become tomorrow’s accepted forms. It’s precisely how we’ve arrived at where we are now. But there’s a core to the purpose of any language, and that is that we all understand it so we can communicate. We accept variations from the mean, but stray too far and meaning can change. Some people say we don’t need apostrophes as the meaning is always obvious from the context. I’d say that’s true 99% of the time, but there are always borderline cases where it can cause confusion, so it’s better to have a rule and accept that it might sometimes be disobeyed (wilfully or erroneously) than to simply abandon the rule altogether.

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Professional titles and positions – should they start with a capital letter?

~ Charlie Hankers

People have always been flattered by having their positions start with a capital letter. It marks them out from their subordinates, and makes Persons look Very Important. Anyone from The Queen down to the Area Manager can access an exclusive capitalisation club that is ever out of bounds to the cleaners, sales assistants and copywriters of the world.

But at what point is it wise to stop? If the Area Manager is capitalised, should the Branch Manager? The Assistant Branch Manager? The Team Leader? And if the Chairman of Shell gets a capital, should the Chairman of Bob’s Plumbing Services (Bob)?

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Jacob Rees-Mogg’s infamous style guide

~ Charlie Hankers

Well, who’d have thought it? One of the first controversies of the Johnson era hasn’t come from some unfortunate gaffe, but from an issue very close to writers’ and editors’ hearts: style guides. To bring you up to speed, ITV News has revealed that the new Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, has instructed the staff in his department to abide by a style guide that has been largely ridiculed in the outside world.

There’s also a list of banned words, which one can only hope are restricted to certain circumstances, as they contain such taboo words as “Equal”, “Unacceptable”, Got”, “Lot” and “Hopefully”.

That style guide in full

Per the ITV’s reporting, the guide states:

  • Organisations are SINGULAR
  • All non-titled males – Esq.
  • There is no . after Miss or Ms
  • M.P.s – no need to write M.P. after their name in body of text
  • Male M.P.s (non-privy councillors) – in the address they should have Esq., before M.P. (e.g. Tobias Ellwood, Esq., M.P.)
  • Double space after fullstops
  • No comma after ‘and’
  • CHECK your work
  • Use imperial measurements

Where to start …

Oxford commas

Social media has focused on the Oxford comma rule, with wags posting the examples of how sentences can go awry if they are left out.

In the UK we don’t tend to separate the last two items in a list with a comma, as is common in the US:

🇬🇧 There was a dog, a camel, a mouse and a cow
🇺🇸 There was a dog, a camel, a mouse, and a cow

Good writers and editors should be able to spot when one is necessary to avoid ambiguity. You can’t simply rule out every instance of commas after “and”. It’s silly.

Esquire

This falls into the silly category, too. The rules of a language, such as they are, are determined by its speakers. That might sound odd coming from an editor, but there are things I let pass today that I wouldn’t have 20 years ago because they are now considered standard. “Esquire” has fallen into virtual disuse, and imposing it is Rees-Mogg being, well, Rees-Mogg.

Singular organisations

We can all live with that (with caveats).

No dot after Miss or Ms

Yes, this is fine. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dot after Miss. I suppose I probably have seen one after Ms, but not very often. The rule goes: you don’t need a dot at the end of an abbreviation if its last letter is also the last letter of the word. So:

  • Regent St (Street)
  • Dr Foster (Doctor)
  • Mr Humphries (Mister)
  • etc. (et cetera)

M.P.s

Although the punctuation in M.P. is not actually one of the rules per se, it’s implied by his writing it that way. It’s another oddity really – we’d usually spell it MP. It’s much better as a possessive that way (MP’s is neater than M.P.’s) and also as a plural (M.P.s versus MPs). Those dots age the abbreviation about forty years. You can almost hear the hammering of the typewriter.

Double space after fullstops

Just no.

CHECK your work

Cool.

Use imperial measurements

Yeah, fine.

WAIT, WHAT?

The UK, along with most of the world, adopted metric measurements in the 1970s, and both imperial and metric systems have lived happily alongside each other ever since. Because of our long legacy of imperial use, it makes sense to have road signs in miles and speedometers in miles per hour. We measure TVs, monitors and hard disk drives in inches. It’s all a bit like driving on the left – we may as well keep it because changing over would be a massive headache.

However, imperial measurements aren’t taught in schools any more. The weather report is in °C. We buy foods in grams (apart from quarter pounder burgers and pints of beer). And clothes sizes vary comfortingly from shop to shop.

Bendy bananas

Unfortunately, a narrative has been allowed to develop that says the EU is trying to impose the metric system on the UK against its will, when the truth is nothing of the sort. The UK willingly changed to metric, stopped halfway and everybody’s happy. The idea that we’re being forced to adopt the metric system can be filed in the same drawer as the bendy bananas and not being able to say Christmas. (If anything, it’s the staff of the Leader of the House who will be having rules thrust upon them. Anyone born after the mid-1960s probably has little understanding of Fahrenheit, gallons, feet, yards, fathoms, furlongs and leagues.)

I’m inclined to think Rees-Mogg is trolling us here, but he could be sincere. Who knows? He is essentially a caricature of the upper-class bumbling twit, a staple of the PG Wodehouse universe, and it’s a caricature he cultivates and enforces at every opportunity – he’s even given to making fun of himself about it. Like Johnson’s carefully ruffled-up hair, it’s part of who he is.

Before Brexit came along, anyone who encountered Rees-Mogg saw him as a comedy act, an eccentric Etonian MP who had stepped out of the 1930s. But since he came out strongly in support of leaving the EU, his political influence has grown. Now he has some power, it hasn’t taken him long to exercise his power in the only way he can: by turning back the calendar.

Whether this latest debacle is part of his cultivated image or a passionately held belief is anyone’s guess. Either way, it’s entirely political, and doesn’t exactly chime with the idea of the UK as being a global trading nation. Anyway, a cynic would recognise this whole story as the classic dead cat strategy.

King of the comma splice

By the way, I’ve noticed over the past few months that JRM is perhaps not best qualified to point out other people’s grammatical and punctuational failings, especially when it comes to the comma splice. Check out this rogue’s gallery.

Whether or not you agree with Rees-Mogg’s politics, you do not have to agree with his style guide. Let English be English.

Hyphens, en dashes and em dashes: how to use them

~ Charlie Hankers

They might all look vaguely similar, but hyphens and dashes serve very different purposes. Here’s a quick rundown of their differences and how to use them.

Hyphen ‐

The hyphen is shorter than both dashes (although in some typefaces, it can look identical). It has two purposes in writing and typography: joining words and splitting words.

Joining words

When two words (or a word and a prefix/suffix) are being made into one, they are joined by a hyphen. Hyphens are often used to join two parts of an adjective to prevent ambiguity. Consider:

  • a cold-blooded animal (the blood is cold, not the animal that happens to have blood)
  • a second-hand clothes shop (the clothes are second-hand)
  • a six-year-old girl (the girl is six years old)
  • there were six year-old girls (there were six girls who were 12 months old)

When a hyphenated word comes into popular usage, it usually loses its hyphen. Nobody would describe an aircraft as being super-sonic any more.

Splitting words

In typography, if a word is so long that it would cause unacceptable word spacing if it were to go on the next line, it can be split with a hyphen. In word processors, you can specify that a hyphen is optional. That means that if the whole word fits on a line, it will not be broken, but if it doesn’t you can specify where it will split.

It’s good practice to split words as naturally as possible, so the reader gets an idea of the pronunciation. That usually means splitting at the end of each syllable.  For example:

  • man-slaughter, not mans-laughter
  • co-operate, not coop-erate
  • Mersey-side, not Mers-eyside
  • proof-read-ing, not pro-ofre-ading

Don’t split words with one syllable.

As a copywriter, I don’t really need to worry about this kind of hyphenation because I don’t really know where individual words will appear on the page. It’s a job for typesetters and designers.

Splitting hyphenated words

If a word is naturally hyphenated, it is bad practice to split it anywhere else if it doesn’t fit on the line. If the natural hyphen cannot be used to break to word, consider changing the letter spacing or word spacing.

Hyphens and word counts

A hyphenated word counts as one word. However, most word counts are specified for visual reasons, so don’t worry if you have a lot of hyphenated words and the count seems low. Usually, a single hyphenated word will count as two from a design perspective.

Do Hyphenated Words in Title Case Have Capitals?

Whether hyphenated words in title case* have both component words starting with a capital depends on the style. Technically, a hyphenated word is one word, so only the first letter should be capitalised. However, some styles demand that both, or all, component words, plus prefixes and suffixes, start with a capital.

* “Title case” is the heading style to this section, where each major words starts with a capital, as opposed to “sentence case”, where normal capitalisation is used (like all the other headings here).

En dash –

The en dash has three main purposes: as a bridge between items in a range; as a type of parenthetical symbol; or in place of a colon or semicolon. Its name comes from the fact that it’s the length of a lower-case letter n.

Bridging with an en dash

Where there’s a range of numbers, they can be shown with an unspaced en dash in place of the word “to”. It also works with letters, when they are being used alphabetically. So we can write:

  • The job will be ready in three to four days or The job will be ready in 3–4 days.
  • Complete sections A to E or Complete sections A–E

Note that there is no space before or after the dash. Typographically, however, the dash can be used to break over two lines, like a hyphen.

An en dash can also be used to denote journeys, periods of time or pieces of infrastructure. Again, the dash replaces the word “to”:

  • The Stockton–Darlington railway
  • The Victorian–Edwardian eras

Using bridging en dashes with units of measurement

If you’re using a dash to show a range of units, you only need to use the unit once.

  • 56–62 °C, not 56 °C–62 °C
  • 3–6 o’clock, not 3 o’clock–6 o’clock

If you want to avoid ambiguity by mentioning the unit twice, use the word “to” instead.

Note: a bridging en dash means “to”, not “and”

Avoid using an en dash to replace the word “and”, particularly when following the word “between”.

  • between 6 and 8 years, not between 6–8 years

En dash as a parenthetical symbol

The second use of the en dash is as a parenthetical symbol. Parentheses are the ( and ) symbols, often called brackets. That gives a clue to the use of en dashes in this context – they are used to separate a word, phrase or clause from the sentence that surrounds it. It’s useful for giving additional information or reminding the reader abut some previously mentioned fact. In most cases, the en dash can be swapped with parentheses, em dashes or commas and the sentence will work perfectly well.

Note that these en dashes are spaced; that is, they have a space before and after them.

  • The farmer – who had been watching closely – took aim and fired.
  • The farmer—who had been watching closely—took aim and fired.
  • The farmer (who had been watching closely) took aim and fired.
  • The farmer, who had been watching closely, took aim and fired.

However, if a sentence is long and convoluted, with several nesting parentheticals, it’s good to mix up the types to aid clarity.

  • The farmer – who had been watching closely and concluded (wrongly) that the foxes were after his chickens – took aim and fired.

is preferable to:

  • The farmer, who had been watching closely and concluded, wrongly, that the foxes were after his chickens, took aim and fired.
  • The farmer (who had been watching closely and concluded (wrongly) that the foxes were after his chickens) took aim and fired.

As a rule, the sentence should work equally well with or without the part that’s parenthesised.

  • The farmer took aim and fired.
  • The farmer – who had been watching closely and concluded that the foxes were after his chickens – took aim and fired.

En dash as a colon or semicolon

A spaced en dash can often replace a colon or a semicolon, and can be advisable if there are already (semi)colons in the sentence.

  • There was only one possible solution: jump.
  • There was only one possible solution – jump.

 

  • I like the summer; it reminds me of home.
  • I like the summer – it reminds me of home.

Em dash —

The em dash is the longest of the dashes, supposedly the length of a letter m (hence its name). It can be used parenthetically or to replace missing words or letters.

Em dash as a parenthetical symbol

The em dash has exactly the same parenthetical purpose as the spaced en dash above. Its use is purely a matter of style. Even parenthetically, it can be either spaced or unspaced, but note that unspaced em dashes do take up a lot or room and can look unsightly. The em dash is generally favoured in the US, whereas in the UK the en dash takes precedence; but there are no set rules here.

Em dash to replace missing words or letters

The em dash can be used to show hidden or missing text. That might be:

  1. to carry a plot (where the writer doesn’t want the reader to find something out
  2. where text is unknown or unknowable
  3. where expletives are used.

Examples:

  1. She finally worked out that C— was the murderer
  2. The ancient engraving said “Lorem I— dolor sit amet, c—tur adi—od tempor
  3. “Come back here, you f—g m—r,” she requested.

Photo: Kristaps Grundsteins