A Word, Please: Six punctuation mistakes you’re probably making
National Punctuation Day, cooked up by Northern California punctuation enthusiast Jeff Rubin, aims to help kids get a better grasp of punctuation. But the Sept. 24 holiday is a good excuse for adults to brush up, too. So here are six punctuation mistakes you’re probably making.
You write the 90’s instead of the ‘90s. So you’re feeling nostalgic and want to reminisce about your heyday — that one decade when everything was awesome and so were you. Breezily dispensing with the 1 and the 9, you type “the 90’s.” You don’t fret over the apostrophe. You’re sure there’s one in there somewhere. Unfortunately, you picked the wrong place. An apostrophe shows dropped letters or numerals, like the 19 that’s omitted when you write about the ‘90s. And because apostrophes aren’t needed to make a number plural, you shouldn’t put an apostrophe before the S.
You’re fooled by apostrophe imposters. In the last paragraph I typed ‘90s, starting with an apostrophe. But Microsoft Word replaced my punctuation mark with an open single quotation mark. They’re on the same keyboard key — the one just to the right of the semicolon. But in many fonts, an apostrophe curves with the opening to the left, while an open single quotation mark curves with the opening to the right, like the letter C.
You create a “dash splice.” This isn’t a well-known term. In fact, until I Googled it just now, I thought I’d made it up. But I’m hoping it’ll catch on. Like the famous comma splice, a dash splice uses a punctuation mark to fuse together independent clauses that should probably stand alone as separate sentences. But it uses an em dash instead of a comma. “I enjoyed meeting your husband — Jay’s a great guy.” A close reading of the rules for dashes shows that’s not quite right. Dashes can set off parenthetical information. “Jay — Rachel’s husband since the ‘90s — is a great guy.” Dashes can also indicate an abrupt change in sentence structure. “It’s true that Jay — in fact you’re the one who told me Jay is a great guy.” But a dash shouldn’t be used to splice two independent clauses into a single sentence.
You put the period before the closing parenthesis. Here’s a tip for using parentheses: Always note whether the stuff inside the parentheses constitutes a complete sentence. Often, that’s how you’ll know whether your period goes inside or out. For example: We had a great meal (vegetable lasagna). Because vegetable lasagna is not a complete sentence, the period doesn’t come till after the parenthesis. Compare that to: We had a great meal. (We ordered the vegetable lasagna.) By the way, if you get really excited about baked pasta, you could end that first example with an exclamation point followed by a parenthesis followed by a period: We had a great meal that night (vegetable lasagna!).
You hyphenate adverbs that end with ly. Note that a family-owned business and a recently opened business are hyphenated differently. Adverbs that end in ly aren’t hyphenated as part of a compound adjective like “recently opened.” But nouns can be hyphenated in compounds, including nouns that end in ly.
You use a semicolon to create a one-sentence paragraph. This one isn’t really a mistake, unless you like logic. I do. So I’m going to take a stand here. If you want to use a semicolon to join two independent clauses, maybe ask yourself first if they’re the only two independent clauses in the whole paragraph. If the answer’s yes, don’t bother using a semicolon. Make two separate sentences instead. The reason: One of the semicolon’s jobs is to join to “closely related” independent clauses; for example, you could join this clause with the one before it. But why is one long sentence better than two shorter sentences? Paragraph structure already says, “All the ideas in this paragraph go together.” So a semicolon in one-sentence paragraph is redundant.
--
JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.