Let's make punctuation fashionable again

🥺🧓🏫🤹♾️🪛

AUTHOR’S NOTE: this free blog is full of observations and opinions about the state of writing English today. That comes from several decades in journalism and owned media. Together with Kerry Smith, I put that experience to good use in the writing classes we run for people in organisations who want to write clear, unfussy and effective English. The partner blog to this one contains practical tips towards that end. That one, you pay for – and I’m tremendously grateful to anyone who supports my work.

It’s 22 years since a book called Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation came out and became one of those surprise bestsellers that makes publishers simultaneously weep with joy and cry with frustration at the unpredictability of their trade. It made author and humourist Lynne Truss a household name, two decades before another woman bearing that surname made an even bigger joke of it.

That the book got published at all in 2003 was unexpected. For it to be published in 2025 would be like Mark Zuckerberg going into antiquarian bookselling or doing something equally out of charaacter, such as not trying to destroy journalism.

Even though it is 2025, I still believe good writers should know about punctuation. I still think it’s the hallmark of someone’s writing style. Even in corporate communications, you can still tell a lot about an organisation from the clarity of its writing. And without proper punctuation, you still don’t get clear sentences.

Okay, what’s with all those ‘stills’?

‘Still’ is one of those nervy words. It betrays a nervousness in the writer – a need to assert something that surely doesn’t need to be asserted? (Adding a question mark is another. So is inserting the word ‘surely’. Insider tip: whenever a writer uses a surely you know they are anything but sure).

So, my having to assert that the art of punctuation is alive and important tells you that there must be people who think that it isn’t – and isn’t.

Knowing your long dashes from your hyphens, your semi- from your full colons, finding your way through the treacherous territory where lurks the English comma – well, all that knowledge is superfluous, obsolete.

Or so the argument goes. Emojis now communicate a much, much wider range of emotional nuance; and they’re a lot more fun. Then there’s AI. Just feed a load of words into the machine in any order you like and the machine will turn them into nice, intelligible sentences. Hell, even spellcheck will punctuate your document for you.

I still think you need to know about punctuation.

“Did they say ‘No more nuts’ or No more! Nuts!’ Photo by Mihai Surdu on Unsplash

I once worked with a brilliant salesperson. They were engaging, enthusiastic and personable

Their writing was also a nightmare.

A proposal would be a gush of verbiage all pitched at the same breathless level. The poor reader had no idea what was important or why, much less how one idea led logically to the next. That’s because there was no punctuation to speak of, unless you count the word ‘and’ as a punctuation mark.

I could mend the written proposals, albeit at the expense of a few late nights.

What I couldn’t mend were the meetings. Nor could spellcheck, nor AI. The salesperson’s delivery was also unedited and unpunctuated. Engaging, enthusiastic, personable as they were, you’d see clients frown as they struggled to fix on to a single message and central idea, something they could take back and explain to other people.

The relationship between the way we speak and the way we write isn’t straightforward. But let’s just accept that there is one. And someone who speaks without punctuation is like a singer who doesn’t know how to phrase. You can have the best voice in the world, but what comes out is a breathless mess.

Punctuation before emojis

Remember these?

:‑)

:‑(

%‑)

They mean, respectively, happy, sad and (I am relying on Wikipedia here) ‘partied all night’.

They were called emoticons, an interim technique that met a need in a pre-emoji world. To anyone who has never known anything but emojis, they must seem hilariously clunky.

People found the orthodox keyboard punctuation marks that had been around for centuries insufficient, I don’t know, to show just what fun, engaging people they were. Which is fine. It’s evolution and the emoticon has now been evolved out of existence now we have a million-strong dictionary of 21st century hieroglyphs at our fingertips.

But I don’t use emojis. Okay, maybe once in a while in a whatsapp chat about football. Certainly never in professional life.

Why? Honestly, it makes me shudder when fellow middle aged males scatter their messages with cute little images. It’s embarrassing, like fiftysomethings trying to dress and sound like teenagers.

An emoji addict at work

And by the time we’ve latched onto the ‘latest’ sweet little sign-off, the young people have already moved on. I remember the then British Prime Minister, David Cameron, being embarrassed when he thought LOL meant ‘lots of love’ rather than Laugh Out Loud. And maybe LOL means something else now? The recent Netflix drama Adolescence hinged on a scene when an embarrassed teenage son had to take his father, a detective investigating the murder of a schoolgirl, through the hidden – and constantly changing – meanings in text messages.

You can’t keep up, so don’t even try. We might be at the start of a great 3,000 year linguistic reversion to a pictorial rather than an alphabetical script and the great writers of the future will all be using hieroglyphs. For now, I’m stuck with my ancient keyboard, with its fusty and Spartan collection of one or two dots, commas, commas with dots, sequences of dots and more comma things that go up in the air, vertical lines with dots and horizontal lines without them. How the hell do you tell people what you’re feeling and thinking with those? It’s a bit like putting down a smartphone and using sticks and stones instead.

But it can be done. Let’s look at some words:

Have a great weekend. I hope we can work together soon.

That’s fine: two decent, whole, clear English sentences. But even this straightforward message can be coloured and amplified without resorting to, say a 🙏 or a 😀or – the one I hate the most – 🤣.

Have a great weekend – I hope we can work together soon!

That dash adds urgency. The exclamation mark (or ‘screamers’ as they used to be known in the newspaper trade) says ‘Hey! I’m friendly and harmless! (It also comes across as needy).

Have a great weekend. I hope we can work together soon…

Those three dots are a bit sneaky. They hint at something best left unsaid (probably, ‘we’ve been talking about this project for A YEAR’).

Have a great weekend; I hope we can work together soon.

This is quite correct and more than a little self-conscious. I have an editor friend who bans semi-colons from the articles he receives on the grounds they’re almost never necessary and often pretentious.

You can still get useful effects without punctuation, emojis or emotions by heading to the format tab:

Have a great weekend. I HOPE we can work together soon.

Some old-school people think italics, underlinings and capitalising are cheap tricks beneath the dignity of proper writers. I’m not that stuffy, but a little of this formatting emphasis goes a long way… unless you are the President of the United States of America or certain newspapers where USING CAPS tells your readers this is IMPORTANT and you are TELLING THE TRUTH!!!!!

The best way to learn good punctuation?

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who reads dialogue in front of the mirror to test if it sounds right

Write down what you want to say then read it out loud you’ll realise where the pauses and breaths should naturally go it’s at that point that you can play around and develop a more personal style whether it’s slower more considered or urgent and fast.

I’ve just read that out loud and here’s my edit:

Write down what you want to say, then read it out loud. You’ll realise where the pauses and breaths should naturally go. It’s at that point that you can play around (a bit) and develop a more personal style – whether it’s slower, more considered – or urgent and fast.

Can’t live without more tips on good writing?

The companion blog to this – for paid subscribers – has the last word on full stops, colons and exclamation marks.

Not on my playlist

I have a playlist called ‘Subjunctives’. What self-respecting grammar nerd wouldn’t? Maybe I need to start a Punctuation one, too.

One song that won’t be on it is Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend. It begins: ‘Who gives a f*** about an Oxford comma?’

Well, there are things I give more of a f*** about – false comparatives, dangling participles, sentences without main verbs among them. The Oxford comma is a picturesque little lane off the main highway of language evolution. It’s worth the detour if you’ve time.

You have three things in a list: let’s say, a verb, a subject and an object. I’ve written that in the way would write it everywhere except in the USA – and Oxford. They’d write:

You have three things in a list: let’s say, a verb, a subject, and an object

No, I can’t see the point of that last comma either: it introduces an extra pause where none is needed. But if it makes them feel happier, so be it.

Let’s hear it from the pulpit

...intellectually speaking, English spelling does not matter. Shakespeare spelled his name at least four different ways, and it may have puzzled his cashiers at the bank.

Intellectually, stops matter a good deal. If you are getting your commas, semicolons and full-stops wrong, it means you are not getting your thoughts right, and your mind is muddled.

William Temple (1881-1944), Archbishop of Canterbury

ps What did those emojis at the top mean? ‘Why some old-school skills are forever useful’.