Archive for the ‘Punctuation’ Category

There’s a phrase you’re bound to need to use when writing a CV, a bio for a proposal, or showing off in a World of Warcraft chat room, to prove how practised you (or your colleague/client/avatar) are.

But there you may pause (and you wouldn’t be the first). Is it year’s experience or years’ experience? You’re talking about experience belonging to years, so you know it needs an apostrophe somewhere. But where?

The simple answer is that it all depends on how much experience you actually have (easy now). If it’s one year, write year’s experience. If it’s multiple years, put years’ experience. The apostrophe (and additional s, if necessary) just attaches to the end of the appropriate word written in full – as if the ’[s] stood in for the word of:

I have one year of experience = I have one year’s experience

She has twelve years of experience = She has twelve years’ experience

And this rule applies in the same way whenever you refer to anything that ‘belongs’ to a period of time. Lynne Truss brings this point up (along, you imagine, with a delicate smattering of rabid froth) in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, where she bemoans the absence of an apostrophe in the film title Two Weeks Notice.

What the producers meant, of course, was Two Weeks’ Notice. Did they learn nothing from A Hard Day’s Night?

A Sussex-based brewery has upset fans of punctuation with its inconsistent use of apostrophes.

Apostrophe Protection Society member Jonathan Cook has taken to Facebook to campaign for Harveys Brewery to sort out its style. While the brewery usually omits the apostrophe from its brand name, Cook was apparently incensed after seeing the apostrophe suddenly included on beer pumps for Harveys Best Bitter at a Hove pub. (One can only imagine the internal turmoil he suffered, torn between a desire for consistency and for accuracy.)

According to the marketing boss at Harveys, Bill Inman, the name should be naked of punctuation, and the brewery takes no responsibility for errant apostrophes or vigilante pump-makers. ‘There is no apostrophe in Harveys,’ he told The Argus. ‘If one appears on a pump somewhere it is without official sanction and I want to see the evidence.’

In fact, the inconsistency is in evidence on Harveys’ own site, where the name on the Christmas ale label includes an apostrophe. Mind you, that might be a simple error that has something to do with the beer having an alcohol content of 8.1 per cent.

It’s not often that punctuation makes the headlines. But the uproar over the apparent threat to the Oxford comma has proved that passion for punctuation can bubble just below the surface. (It also answers indie band Vampire Weekend’s question: who gives a **** about an Oxford comma? Lots of people, it seems.)

For those who missed it, Twitter recently erupted amid fears that Oxford University Press was dropping the so-called Oxford (or serial) comma. ‘Are you people insane? The Oxford comma is what separates us from the animals’, read one outraged tweet.

In fact, what the Oxford comma separates is the second-to-last item in a list of three or more, and a coordinating conjunction (generally and or or). For example: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Views on it have long been divided, with American English typically opting for it (it is also known as the Harvard comma in the US), and British English opting against. Meanwhile, journalists on both sides of the Atlantic usually save column space by leaving it out.

The most sensible approach is to avoid a blanket rule either way and employ that final comma only when it will help to avoid ambiguity.

The serial comma would add nothing in the sentence:

At the breakfast briefing, they served eggs, toast and coffee

but might be useful to separate the items clearly in this one:

At the breakfast briefing, they served coffee, eggs and bacon, and toast and jam.

But now consider the difference between

The speaker said he had been inspired by his colleagues, Jeffrey Archer and Lady Gaga [suggests – startlingly – that Jeffrey Archer and Lady Gaga are the speaker’s colleagues]

and

The speaker said he had been inspired by his colleagues, Jeffrey Archer, and Lady Gaga [the speaker has been moved by three entities: his colleagues, Jeffrey Archer (mysteriously), and Lady Gaga].

Not so redundant after all, eh?

It has now emerged that the advice to drop the punctuation mark was only for Oxford University staff writing press releases and internal communications. You might be tempted to believe – amid all the vows of reinvigorated love and eternal loyalty – that behind the now infamous Oxford comma lurks an ingenious PR agent, rubbing his hands with glee. (We couldn’t possibly comment.)

Do you have strong feelings one way or the other? Or do you perhaps feel there is another element of punctuation or grammar that could do with some good press or the threat of abolition?

Drop us a line and let us know.

Write Away reader Bill Friar got in touch to air one of his professional writing bugbears:

‘I would dearly love to see an item on the creeping trend of putting commas between people’s names and their titles or descriptive terms. For example: “Prime Minister, David Cameron, spoke outside Downing Street….” or “action star, Tom Cruise, went on a rampage…”

‘I don’t remember seeing this kind of thing very often even five years ago. Now it’s everywhere. The madness must stop.’

Thanks, Bill. You make an excellent point – those double commas hugging Tom Cruise and David Cameron shouldn’t be there.

But why is this punctuation wrong?

Appositives

It’s wrong because Tom and David, in the above examples, are restrictive appositives.

Say what?

An appositive is a word, phrase or clause that renames, explains or identifies another noun in the same sentence. They can be restrictive or nonrestrictive. For example:

Emphasis Training, the business-writing trainers, are based in Brighton.

You’ll notice that the appositive above is tucked away between commas. This is because ‘the business-writing trainers’ is a nonrestrictive appositive: if you remove it from the sentence you’d still know who the subject (Emphasis) is, and it would still make sense.

However, some appositives are restrictive – they can’t be left out of the sentence without changing the meaning or leaving people confused. Restrictive appositives should not have commas round them.

In Bill’s examples, the names can’t be removed because it would leave the sentences incomplete, as they don’t start with a determiner (eg the, a, our etc):

Prime Minister spoke outside Downing Street…

Action star went on a rampage…

And even if they did, we might still need more information to properly identify the subjects in question, and not leave the reader guessing. For all we know, Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina was speaking outside Downing Street about Bruce Willis’s recent rampage.

Now that’s how rumours get started.