Experiments in style: punctuation only

What does your punctuation tell you about your writing?

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

Greetings!

Welcome to my ongoing (and potentially never-ending!) project, experiments in style. The Introduction below explains what it’s all about, but if you already know then just go straight to the reworked version, below.

Enjoy!

Introduction

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into a completely different style. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Experimenting with styles

Here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

The original (template) text

In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

A Bang on the head: punctuation only

People have habits in the way they punctuate their writing just as they display habits in the turns of phrase they use. An obvious ‘no no’ is the overuse of exclamation marks¹. But are there others? Do you, for instance, have a predilection for using semi-colons rather than commas?

In this version of my story, I used a tool in the web to strip out everything apart from the punctuation! Here it is:

, ( - ) , — — . - . , , . . , " " , - . , . , % .

Read more about the tool and how it arose: Punctuation tool.

Well, what do you think?

1. In my small corner of the internet I took revenge on England’s Department for Education a few years ago when, in yet another manifestation of its proclivity to micro-manage teachers it pompously frowned upon the use of exclamation marks except in particular circumstances. I didn’t think their ‘advice’ was necessarily correct, but my view is that correct or not, it’s not the government’s place to go into such detail about what constitutes good writing. Perhaps if, one of these days, politicians stop “delivering” targets and “driving forward agendas”(both of which break their own rules — see the government’s style guide) then I will believe they have the moral authority to pontificate about what counts as good English. Anyway, my “revenge” consisted of creating a macro, free for anyone to download, that converted all full stops in a document to exclamation marks. I tried it on the DfE’s guidance on exclamation points, and I have to say I thought the revised version was a great improvement.