On the Shelf

MIND THE STOP: A BRIEF GUIDE TO PUNCTUATION, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged, by G.V. Carey. Cambride (Eng.): Cambridge University Press, 1958. 130 pages. 95 cents.

Few people, I suspect, would maintain that their ability to write English correctly and effectively could not be improved. No matter what one's channels of endeavor. one should try to write his own language as well as possible. Punctuation is probably the aspect to which the least attention is paid these days: yet it is an essential, and no mere refinement.

A person's punctuation is as good a quick clue to the clarity and logic of his thinking as any I know. Nevertheless, hordes of people seem never to have heard of the semi-colon. one of the most valuable resources in the whole punctuational arsenal; and others, especially in epistolary usage, seem never to have heard of anything but the dash--unless it be the triple exclamation point! And even such a splendid and important novel as Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth is marred by horrible punctuation, particularly the author's evidently insatiable passion for the period.

Twenty years ago G.V. Carey took a fling at drawing up his ideas on punctuation. Now he has updated and expanded his effort into a handy book, the best short compendium on the subject to be found anywhere. Carey regards punctuation as "governed two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste," and its first essential as conveying the meaning "to the reader's mind, through his eye, with the least possible delay and without any ambiguity." He feels that "the best punctuation is that of which the reader is least conscious."

Carey illustrates all his points with apt quotations from recent books or newspapers. His commentary is pellucid; and it avoids all, but the most elementary technical terms of grammar and syntax. From time to time evidences of a delightful wit even crop up.

The material is clearly organized, with cross-references where appropriate. Carey takes up seriatim the various punctuationl signs: period, colon, semi-colon, comma, parentheses, brackets, exclamation and question marks, single and double quotation marks, hyphen, apostrophe, capitals, italics, and paragraph indentation. And, although they are somewhat ancillary to the main topic, he adds two chapters--one on proofreading (I found only two slips in proofreading in the whole book); and the other on common grammatical and stylistic errors in such matters as participial agreement, the barbarous use of "following" for "after," the "due to"-"owing to" distinction, the coupling of relative clauses, and the placement of "only."

Carey's argumentation throughout is utterly sound; and on only a couple of extremely minute points would I care to disagree with him. There is no one who could not derive much profit from a careful perusal of this pocket-sized but capacious volume. (There is, in the above remarks, a glaring error in punctuation. Did you notice it?)