Good Punctuation Is Essential, Robin.

Some Oz and Readers might have assumed (or hoped) that PUNCTUATION WEEK would mean skipping a weekly Robin installment. But comics have punctuation, too.

In fact, popular American comics have developed their own system of punctuation and typography, related to but not conforming to the standards for prose. Worries about capitalization go away when most sentences are rendered ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

Comics punctuation allows writers and letterers to do some things that standard prose styles don't allow. Using boldface for emphasis, for example. Larger letters for more emphasis. Boldface and larger letters for even more emphasis!

The shapes, sizes, and layouts of speech balloons function as a form punctuation--that topic could be a posting in itself. In fact, earlier this month I discussed how David Hutchison came to use balloon shapes and fonts to distinguish his characters in Oz: The Manga. So today I'll just mention a few miscellaneous quirks of comics punctuation.

The panel on the right shows a rather unusual use of punctuation in a superhero comic dating from the "Golden Age" or early "Silver Age." Indeed, that usage probably shows up in this panel only because it was created in 1943, when the standard style was still being developed. Can you spot the detail?

It's a period. The first two sentences of the surgeon's speech end with periods. By the late 1940s, as far as I can tell, that punctuation had all but disappeared from DC Comics.

Instead, most remarks in speech balloons became exclamations! Everything was dramatic! Even the most mundane remarks!

And if a speech really didn't call for an exclamation point or question mark...then it ended with an ellipsis--or two hyphens... (Or three hyphens, or one, or four dots--all shown in these 1940s panels.)

One sign that American comic books were maturing in the 1980s was that they welcomed back periods.

And what about those two hyphens? It's almost impossible to find an em dash in superhero comics of the 1950s and '60s. But those comics were usually hand-lettered (mechanical type was cheaper, but awkward and less expressive). Letterers could easily have drawn a long dash; they weren't bound by typewriter conventions. But two hyphens must have appeared on the typewritten scripts, and thus two hyphens went into the speech balloons.

As time passed, the two-hyphen style became the comics standard. According to the Dark Horse Comics style sheet printed in Peter David's Writing for Comics, double dashes have multiple uses but "long dashes and semi-colons are not used in comics punctuation. Colons are used only on rare occasions." How long will that last?

On the left, Nightwing demonstrates another form of punctuation found in comics of all kinds (not just superhero adventures): the combination of question mark and exclamation point.

The two punctuation marks almost always appear in that order, though I've seen such variations as ?!? and ?!?!?!

This punctuation usually signals a combination of puzzlement and alarm. In prose, it's possible to convey those emotions through words outside the dialogue:

• "Who?" Dick yelled.
• "Who?" Dick asked loudly.
• "Who?" Dick said with a combination of puzzlement and alarm.

But comics don't have those options; they have to convey how characters speak graphically. Hence the double punctuation.

Another combination of question mark and exclamation point is the interrobang. As World Wide Words relates, the advertising executive Martin Spekter invented this mark in 1962. He wanted it to signal a rhetorical question: "Have you ever seen such bargains‽" Enough type designers have liked the idea (or, more probably, the name "interrobang") that Unicode reserves space for this mark and its Spanish inverse.

Nevertheless, neither the interrobang nor the juxtaposition of question mark and exclamation point fits in standard prose. They belong only in the most informal or experimental writing. To include them in a book manuscript is to risk being perceived as someone who hasn't read enough books to pick up the rules.

(All that said, the interrobang is on my short list of non-standard punctuation most likely to become standard in the next few decades, if people ever agree on what it signals.)

Finally, comics creators are now in a transition from lettering by hand to inserting digital text into digital art files. The hand-lettered aesthetic is still dominant, so even people who letter on computers use fonts that look like handwriting. (John Norton and Kevin Cannon offers tips on creating a font that looks like your handwriting.) Scott McCloud uses a font based on his writing in his comics, for example, while Eric Shanower still letters by hand--at least as of a year ago.

Given that trend, I suspect we'll see more of the symbol that appears in the following image from the recent Robin collection Days of Fire and Madness. You see the little box after the first period? It's not really punctuation. Rather, the text included a character which that font could not render, so the computer substituted a "missing character" glyph. And no editor caught it, either in the original magazine or this collected edition.

Dot Dot Dot

You folks have probably figured out that PUNCTUATION WEEK at Oz and Ends is really an excuse for me to grouse about the deficiencies of my word-processing program or common glitches I see in manuscripts. But why stop now? Today I address the burning question of ellipses!

When a character is interrupted or breaks off suddenly, that character's dialog should end with an em dash (or its equivalent), as in the alleged last words of Union general John Sedgwick:

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--"

(I'm annoyed to see that, according to Wikipedia, Sedgwick got that whole sentence off--twice!--and only then was felled by a Confederate sharpshooter. The dialog is much more dramatic with the interruption, isn't it?)

On the other hand, when a character's speech trails off into silence, or the narrator doesn't care to pay attention any more, a writer should use an ellipsis, which is Greek for "three little dots."

"No, Mommy, we're not sleepy at..."

"And so, as I wrote on this next slide, the incremental increase in the past fiscal quarter is greater than the corresponding quarter of last year, but smaller than the intervening..."

Every so often I see a new writer tempted to stretch out an ellipsis into four or five periods, apparently to indicate more time passing. That's not standard yet, which means that it's wrong.

Scholarly writing makes a useful distinction between two types of ellipses. That style uses the traditional three periods (or, in proportional typefaces, one ellipsis mark) when a quotation is missing a phrase from within a sentence.

And there's what I'll call (in allusion to James Thomson's "Seasons") a "long ellipsis": three periods with spaces in between them to indicate when a sentence or more has been removed.

I'll take an example from Boston 1775, a quotation from Prof. David Blight, Director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, on the recent legend of a "quilt code" on the Underground Railroad:

The reason your student is not finding primary material on quilting in the Underground Railroad is because in all likelihood there isn’t any. This is “myth” of the softest kind that serves the needs of the present for people who prefer their history as lore and little else. . . .

The quilt story...will survive and thrive as long as it serves real needs in the desires many people have from history--to convert tragedy into something triumphal, suffering into progress, complexity into curiosity, nitty gritty social and political history into material culture we can touch and see.

The first, long ellipsis represents the removal of more than a sentence. (Since it follows a period, the result is four spaced-out dots. But that's the maximum number of dots a writer can pile up.) The second, short ellipsis in the second paragraph occurs within a single sentence.

Tendentious scholarly writing, defined by a previous version of the MLA Style, requires that ellipses added by the writer be signaled with brackets: [...]. Most fields outside literature don't deal with texts that already have their own ellipses, so readers in other disciplines can basically assume that all ellipses have been added by the present writer.

Once again, I suspect, British typesetting is different from American. Some styles dictate a space on either side of an ellipsis mark, and no distinction between the long and short forms.

Title Case: Another Reason the Makers of MS Word Will Be Damned for Eternity

Yesterday I discussed how the “smart quotes” function of Microsoft Word isn't quite as smart as it's made out to be. Which is to say, relying on it will, under particular circumstances, produce the wrong results for a writer. But at least that function tries to approximate the proper use of quotation marks and apostrophes.

"Title Case" doesn't even try. This command is found under "Format" and "Change Case...," at least in my version of MS Word. It will reformat the text you've highlighted so that each word starts with a capital letter and the rest of the letters are in lowercase.

The name "Title Case" implies this is how titles should be formatted. That Is An Error Which A Smart Writer Or Typesetter Tries To Avoid.

There are rules about which words to capitalize in a title. Unfortunately, there are multiple sets of rules, not all agreeing exactly. And the style for newspaper headlines is, once again, slightly different from the style used in book publishing.

Nevertheless, there are rules, which means that MS Word's programmers could have written algorithms to make "Title Case" accurate, or at least more so. Allen Wyatt's Word Tips provides the recipe for a macro that people can apply, but have to complete on their own. Ardamis.com has provided something even better, but only for WordPress blogs.

The Microsoft programmers could also have chosen another name for that function, like "Initial Caps." But no. So now, because of the company's dominant market share, we have lots of people, especially businesspeople, believing their computers are right to Capitalize Every Word In A Title Or Heading.

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Would You Like Curly Quotes with That?

Here's another punctuation peeve for PUNCTUATION WEEK, with more blame for the lowly typewriter. (Mind you, the typewriter was a great improvement over the scrivener as a way of producing legible documents, but I want to be clear about all that our everyday written language gave up for it.)

As part of the Great Typewriter Squeeze, minimizing the number of keys on a typewriter keyboard, manufacturers replaced the traditional open- and close-quotation marks with a symmetric up-and-down ditto mark. "It works both ways!" they told customers. "People will barely notice the difference."

For the same reason, the typewriter's apostrophe was symmetric and stood in for the open-single-quotation mark. (Some folks might even recall creating an exclamation point out of an apostrophe and a period; some typewriters saved another key that way.)

Years ago, I was delighted to find that Microsoft Word and other WYSIWYG word-processing programs offered the option of "curly quotes"--automatic conversion of typewriter apostrophes and quotation marks into the typographical open- and close- forms. This feature also got the name of "smart quotes" because it made both the computer and the writer look smarter.

But not everyone turns on "smart quotes," or knows how to use a global search-and-replace to achieve the same result. For a while, it was easy to spot self-published books by their non-curly quote marks. This wasn't as annoying as what the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks documents, but non-curly quotes do make the world a little less pretty.

Unfortunately, there are still a few bugs in the "smart quotes" system. The algorithms that word-processing programs use for choosing how to make a quote mark curl have problems with certain sentence forms.

• ’Tis a great bother when a sentence starts with an apostrophe. MS Word wants to make anything that looks like a quote mark with a space, tab, or pilcrow in front of it into some kind of open-quote mark.
• “Or when a piece of dialog breaks off sudd--” That sentence should end with a close-quote mark, and my current program keeps making it an open-quote. Em dashes and quote marks have trouble in other situations as well.
• The symbols for inches and feet actually should look like the typewriter's symmetric quote mark and apostrophe, and not curl. Not a big problem for me, but I figure I should acknowledge it.

Finally, because Microsoft doesn't work or play well with others, different word-processing programs, email programs, and browsers handle curly quotes differently. For a while, transferring text from one format to another could make curly quotes disappear, turn into other characters, or turn into code. Unicode is helping to fix that, but Microsoft had to come around to a standard it didn't control.

Will we one day have true “smart quotes” that don't require us to correct what the algorithm gets wrong? I live in hope.

(Folks might notice that, for all my soap-box speechifying about curly quotes and em dashes, I don't usually use them on Oz and Ends. That's because I'm practicing what I've called "Typewriter Realism," creating the illusion of a traditional manuscript using the font and typography of an old-fashioned typewriter. Whether that's a good idea is another question. I've landed on a different style for Boston 1775, with careful attention to curly quotes, most of them hand-typed because there's no “smart quotes” feature for Blogger.)

Dash It All!

More grumbly bits for PUNCTUATION WEEK! English language typography once had a full quiver of dashes in different lengths. These were useful when eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers wished to keep their references anonymous: “In the small village of P——————,” for example.

For journalists, that approach conferred plausible deniability: “You think ‘the corrupt G————— B—————’ refers to ‘Governor Bernard’? No, I’d never thought of that. I was writing about my, um, cousin, George, um, Barleycorn. Now there’s a corrupt fellow.”

Gradually those dashes boiled down to three main types:

hyphen -
en dash –
em dash —

The last two got their names because they're the width of the font's lowercase n and capital M, respectively. (There are still standard uses for two-em and three-em dashes, but they're specialized. Also, according to some standards the en dash should be half the width of the em dash, whatever the font's n looks like.)

Then, about a century ago, came the Great Typewriter Squeeze. As I mentioned yesterday, typewriters offered a limited number of symbols, and required them to all be the same width. Those machines made no distinction between hyphen and en dash, so people basically forgot it (not that many people probably knew it to begin with).

Since a lowercase n and a capital M were the same width, typewriters didn't offer an em dash at all. That punctuation mark is so useful, however, that typists came up with ways to approximate it. The most common were--a double hyphen -- a double hyphen with a space on each side - and a single hyphen with space on each side. Millions of people learned one of those forms in typing class.

Now, with laser and inkjet printers setting type in proportional fonts, we can go back to using em dashes as they were meant to be used--but people are still typing double hyphens. And not just in fonts like this one, designed to replicate the typewriter look.

I still see double hyphens used in proportionally spaced fonts. As a result, dashes--which can be a most elegant form of punctuation--don’t get to spread out as they should. And the result looks unlike a book, and unprofessional.

Of course, in their never-ending quest to make life easier for us, whether we want it or not, many word-processing programs will now automatically convert double-hyphens to em dashes. People still struggle over whether to put spaces before or after those punctuation marks. The standard answer, according to American and traditional British typesetting style, is that there should be no spaces around an em dash.

However, some confusion can easily arise because modern British typesetting style is different. As part of what I've called “The Great British Punctuation Shortage”, many modern British books use an en dash with a space on either side where in America we use an em dash with no spaces. That opens the door to using spaces around en dashes or em dashes if it looks good on a document--as long as one sticks with that style symmetrically and consistently.

And for the cherry atop this sticky sundae of confusion, I'll note that the proofreading symbol that means “insert an em dash here” looks like one wishes to shove in an algebraic value, “one over M.” Check out EEI Communications' proofreading page to see it in action.

Stop Underlining, People!

PUNCTUATION WEEK continues with some good old-fashioned grousing! The English language had a fine system of punctuation and typography until the typewriter came along. (Illustrated history of early models here.)

While that machine made it possible for every office and eventually every household to produce legible, standardized text, it also came with some technical limits. The typewriter keyboard offered writers a smaller set of symbols to choose from. The machine required each character to be exactly the same width. And between those two limitations, our notions of punctuation became sadly impoverished.

Over the last twenty years, laser and inkjet printers have made it possible to approximate the typesetting we see in books. But most people are still typing in ways they learned back in high-school typing classes, and I think the results are ugly.

One example is how typography uses italic type to emphasize a word or indicate the title of a book or similar long artistic work. (Titles of short works, such as songs and short stories, should appear in quotation marks.)

Typewriters couldn’t provide italic characters, so early on their manufacturers came up with an alternative. The standard instruction to typesetters to italicize a word in a handwritten manuscript or a proof was to draw a line underneath it.* By backing up and using the underline key, typists could put lines under their letters. So the style manuals declared that underlining was the typewriter equivalent of italics.

But we don't need underlining anymore, at least not for this use. It looks ugly; that's why we rarely see it in books. And a manuscript that contains both italics and underlining just seems confused. Let's make the shift to italics once and for all!


* Similar proofreading instructions:

• Two lines underneath = put this text in small-caps style.
• Three lines = capitalize.
• A squiggly line = boldface.
• A dotted line = forget what I scribbled and leave the text the way it is.

More to see here.

Underused Punctuation Terms

I've decided to make the next several days PUNCTUATION WEEK at Oz and Ends. Or perhaps I should say it will be a PUNCTUATION PERIOD. Ahem. I'll start with remarks on little known formal names for some punctuation marks.

pilcrow: ¶
For more on this little-known word, see Michael Quinion's World Wide Words article. That's where I first learned the formal name for what I'd thought of only as the "paragraph mark." It was once common as a sort of bullet point and in legal codes, but is now visible mostly to writers using word-processing programs.

virgule: /
Usually called the "slash" these days, though less common synonyms include "separatrix" and "stroke." It's similar to but not the same as the solidus, which is the diagonal line in a fraction. A virgule is closer to the vertical than a solidus, but usually one has to see them side by side in the same typeface to know the difference. On a typewriter, of course, they're the same (and I'll have much more to say about the typewriter's effect on punctuation this week).

guillemets: « »
These are the equivalent of quotation marks (a/k/a "inverted commas") in several languages, including French, Russian, Norwegian, and Persian. They're also the equivalent of quotation marks in several other languages, such as Danish and Czech, but in those cases they point the other way (at the quoted works rather than away from them). Swiss German follows the first convention; German and Austrian German the second. Finally, Finnish and Swedish surround quotations with two guillemets that both point to the right. Chinese typographers have adopted pointing-out guillemets to denote the title of a book. Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style says the word "guillemet" honors the the sixteenth-century typecutter Guillaume le Bé.

octothorpe: #
This is the most recent, and thus seemingly most artificial, of these punctual terms. Once again, Quinion's World Wide Words explains the history: "octothorpe" was Bell Labs jargon for one of those two function keys on touch-tone telephones that got labeled with symbols instead of numbers.

The tic-tac-toe symbol itself had been around long before, of course, usually called the "number sign" or the "pound sign" for what it symbolized. In much of the world, of course, the sign for a pound is £, and it's valuable to keep track of that sort of pound. And the symbol had other names--which is why Bell Labs wanted an official label.

Notwithstanding that effort, American telephone companies now refer to that symbol as "the pound sign," usually in a cheerful mechanical voice. British Telecom prefers "square," a coinage that dates all the way back to 1989. Other English-speaking countries call that button the "hash key," using an older term for the symbol apparently shortened from "crosshatch."

"Number sign" prevails in America when the same symbol is used to designate a number in a series. And the sign is often used to mean a "sharp" in musical notation, though typographically that should look different.

Most paradoxically, in proofreading, a # is the symbol for nothing, indicating that the typesetter should insert a space between two characters. Out of habit I use that symbol when I critique manuscripts, and usually forget to explain what it means. Some of my writing-group partners are no doubt baffled by my apparent love for the octothorpe.