Punctuating Appropriately

Part II: Preparing, Presenting and Polishing Your Work – Chapter 4

4.3 Punctuating Appropriately

Pause and Effect, the title of an acclaimed book on the punctuation of late-medieval manuscripts,[1] neatly summarises a primary function of punctuation: punctuation tells your reader when to ‘pause’ and can have an enormous ‘effect’ on the ability of your prose to communicate your thoughts clearly. Punctuation has a number of other functions as well, and can mean the difference between your carefully crafted sentences functioning successfully or failing. Sentences that lack necessary punctuation or use punctuation incorrectly can end up saying something very different from what you intended. There is no one set of universal rules to follow when punctuating English prose, however, and each sentence, whether long or short, laden with parenthetical clauses or straight to the point, is a unique construct that must be punctuated individually and with care. As with so many other aspects of an academic or scientific paper, effective punctuation requires precision and consistency, and there are some basic principles and patterns that should be observed.

[1] Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).

First, take care to read whatever the journal’s guidelines may say about punctuation. It’s rare to find much if any advice on punctuation in author instructions, but there are instances of very specific requirements. The use of a comma before ‘and’ in lists of three or more items is an example: some journals will want the comma (‘birds, butterflies, and bees’) and some will not (‘birds, butterflies and bees’); if a journal’s guidelines bother to advise authors either way, take that advice to heart and apply it consistently. The use of a comma in conjunction with an ‘and’ that opens an additional independent clause in a sentence comes to mind as another punctuation issue I’ve seen addressed in journal guidelines. Further advice on this and other punctuation usage patterns is sometimes provided in academic and scientific style manuals as well (APA, Chicago, etc.), so if the journal you’re submitting your paper to recommends using a particular style, familiarise yourself with the punctuation rules laid out in the corresponding manual.

When it comes down to the nitty-gritty of punctuating your paper, however, you’ll need to decide which patterns will work best to communicate your research and argument. Once you’ve chosen the patterns you’ll use – a comma or not before that ‘and’ in lists, for instance – be consistent in all similar constructions. Only if you need to change your usual practice to increase the clarity of a sentence (or decrease the risk of misinterpretation) should you vary the pattern (by using a comma before that ‘and’ in lists when absolutely necessary, for instance, even though as a general rule you do not). While you’re refining your punctuation practices, it might be helpful to keep a few basics in mind:

• Remember that a dependent clause opening a sentence (and in other positions as well) should usually be followed by a comma (e.g., ‘According to Smith, these results…’), although shorter clauses can function well without one (e.g., ‘In 2003 the numbers increased…’).
• Full stops are always used at the end of a sentence, and they should be placed inside (to the left of) footnotes, outside (to the right of) parenthetical citations, and either inside or outside Vancouver-style numerical references, depending on journal guidelines.
• The function of a colon (:) is entirely different from that of a semi-colon (;) and the two are frequently confused: a colon heralds an example or several examples (often in the form of a list or quotation) or an explanation of what has just been stated (just as the colon in this sentence does); a semi-colon, on the other hand, is (as it is in this sentence) rather like a large comma, separating independent sections of a long and complex sentence (or sometimes the items of a list that forms a long sentence) in places where a comma simply won’t sufficiently clarify the sentence structure and meaning.

• Hyphenation can be incredibly tricky because dictionaries, style manuals and sometimes journal guidelines can all indicate different patterns and rules – ‘intersubjectivity’ or ‘inter-subjectivity,’ ‘nonsignificant’ or ‘non-significant,’ ‘reintroduce’ or ‘re-introduce’ and so on. If the journal you’re submitting to does not provide specific instructions or a specific style (such as Chicago) to follow, the best policy is to adopt a system and stick to it, remembering that certain compounds should always be hyphenated: when two vowels would end up back to back without the hyphen (re-establish), when confusion could result were the term closed (‘re-create,’ which has a different meaning than ‘recreate’), when the second element bears a capital (non-English) or is a numeral (pre-1990s), and when a compound adjective appears before a noun (a ‘well-known theory’ but a ‘theory that is well known’).

• Finally, although indicated by tiny apostrophes that can get lost at times, possessives should always be accurately punctuated with the general rule being that the apostrophe appears before the ‘s’ in the singular form (student’s) and after it in the plural (students’), though there are, as always in English, exceptions: ‘men’s,’ for example, which does not use an ‘s’ for the plural form, so the ‘s’ is there solely to indicate the possessive and the apostrophe appears before it. Try not to overuse possessives: particularly in their plural form, they can become awkward in English, so it’s often best to write out a phrase using ‘of’ instead of stacking possessives: ‘the participants’ fathers’ occupations,’ for instance, is clearer and more elegant as ‘the occupations of the participants’ fathers.’
• On the use of quotation marks, see Section 5.2.1 below.

PRS Tip: It’s amazing how details can be right before the eyes and still slip past unnoticed, but such is the case with incorrect punctuation, familiar abbreviations and spelling variations. Sometimes this is because the detail is small and unobtrusive: a full stop is tiny, after all, and a semi-colon looks much like a colon when there’s no time to do more than glance at it. At other times it’s due to not knowing – everyone has to look up the differences between American and British English at times. At still other times such negligence is paradoxically caused by knowing the material too well: I’ve seen more than one paper in which an author works to define every acronym that’s used once or twice (and even some that aren’t used again at all), only to neglect providing a definition for an abbreviation that’s unusual, used 50 or 100 times in the paper and absolutely central to the data and argument. A classic case of being so immersed in one’s own work that it becomes difficult to see what the audience might need, this forces a guessing game on readers (except those lucky enough to know the meaning already) and leads to frustration and potential misunderstanding. Fortunately, the PRS proofreading team has many eyes well-trained in the detection of such problems, and the time to attend to them thoroughly and with precision.