Why Proper Punctuation Matters
These days, with the rise in text speak, punctuation often seems to go by the board. People ask, ‘Does it really matter if I don’t use punctuation in emails? You will still understand what I’m saying’.
The answer to this is an emphatic NO! A well-punctuated email helps save everyone’s time and contributes to clarity of meaning. Getting punctuation wrong or not including it can change the whole meaning of a sentence. For example, ‘Let’s eat Bob’ versus ‘Let’s eat, Bob’ shows the difference between suggesting that you have lunch or dinner with Bob, and the suggestion that you actually eat a man called Bob!
Another example relates to the correct use of hyphens, illustrated very clearly in these two usages: ‘Caution! Man eating crocodiles’ or ‘Caution! Man-eating crocodiles’. In the first, the meaning (implausible as it seems!) is that a man is eating crocodiles, in the second, that you are being warned of the presence of man-eating crocodiles.
Quotation marks are sometimes used to put distance between the writer and the words, often perjoratively. If you saw this sentence, ‘Would you buy a sandwich that was made “fresh”?’, it implies that the sandwich is far from being fresh.
The title of Lynne Truss’s acclaimed book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, came from a joke: A panda walks into a bar. He orders a sandwich, eats it, pulls out a gun and fires two shots. The shocked bartender asks him why. The panda throws him a poorly punctuated wildlife manual. ’I’m a panda,’ he says, ‘Look it up,’ and walks out the door. Sure enough, the entry for Panda reads, ‘Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves’. So you can see that adding the comma could lead to increased gun violence!
There are seven key forms of punctuation –
- Full stop
- Comma
- Apostrophe
- Colon
- Semi-colon
- Quotation marks
- Parentheses or brackets
Using each of these appropriately will ensure your meaning is crystal clear. You will also create a professional image and save readers time.