Skip to main content

PUNCTUATION QUERIES

Assuming that 50% of the readers of this blog are teachers of English, can either of you enlighten me on the following points? They are keeping me awake at night.
  1. When writing a sentence between parentheses, should one put the full stop (period for you yanks) inside the brackets, outside the brackets, or both?
  2. In the following sentence, should a question mark be placed after the word "why", or at the end of the sentence? Why is a different, trickier question
  3. When the bloody hell should one hyphenate?
  4. Does the employment of an exclamation mark enhance or neutralise the comic impact of a sentence?
I look forward to your interaction.
Labels:

Comments

Wally Windsor said…
Ya-a-a-a-wn, stre-e-e-e-tch... Ooh, do what? Somebody say summat?
ZZZzzz...
4 October 2007 at 12:35
M C Ward said…
...is the correct answer.
4 October 2007 at 12:41
El Gringo Vasco said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
4 October 2007 at 14:45
El Gringo Vasco said…
2. no question mark, anywhere, as they normally indicate a rise in intonation, and I don't detect any in your sentence. :-)
4 October 2007 at 14:54
M C Ward said…
At last we're getting somewhere...
4 October 2007 at 17:08
EnglishTeacher365 said…
I can help - but I need to find my big book on awful English grammar and punctuation first! Can you wait till tomorrow, dear MC?
4 October 2007 at 17:14
John Zachary Lee said…
I'm going to be a CDF and actually answer your questions to the best of my ability. (And for those not living in Brazil, "CDF" means "Bottom of Iron", or nerd/swot.)

Not sure I grasped your second question. The following look OK to me, depending on whether you're affirming or asking rhetorically:

"Why?" is a different, trickier question.

"Why?" is a different, trickier question?

Hyphenation is to a large extent a matter of taste - the Economist magazine is big on it, too much so from my point of view. I use it only when necessary to make things easier to understand, eg: "She bought a Chinese-made camera." Without the hyphen, the "made" might look like a past tense (rather than past participle) at first glance, thereby tiring the reader.

The excessive use of exclamation marks can kill humour by removing all sutlety. Double or triple exclamation marks should be avoided at all cost, unless used ironically.

Those are my off the hoof (or "off-the-hoof"?) thoughts. What do you think?
4 October 2007 at 17:17
M C Ward said…
englishteacher365, I'll be facing another restless night, but there's no hurry, as long as nobody complains about my punctuation in the meantime. zachary, the second question depended upon the "why" NOT having quotation marks - but this may well be mere flimflam on my part - I suggest we wait for englishteacher365's riposte, he's very probably the daddy in this siuation I feel. Can of Special Brew anyone?
4 October 2007 at 17:29
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FOOLING WITH SCHOOLING

One of the commonest figures to be found within TEFL is the aspiring administrator. This is a teacher who, often drained by years of repetitive, poorly remunerated clowning around in the classroom, seeks a position managing other teachers, such as Director of Studies (aptly and attractively known as "Doss"), from which they can sit in an imaginary TEFL director’s chair smoking a cigar, bellowing, “CUT!” and enjoying not having to pull a linguistic rabbit out of a hat twelve times a day, five days a week. I include myself within this TEFL subgenre, although my past experiences of administration have left me with an odd yearning to get back into the classroom and be king of my own modest sandcastle. In 2005, whilst I was working in HR at a local factory, my Brazilian friend Bert and I decided to start our own school. I had recently managed to wriggle out of a honey trap I’d set for myself, when I offered to give a free English course to my colleagues in the factory’s Training a...
19 comments
Read more

TEFL ANTHEMS VOL. I

An interesting debate over at ELT World in answer to the question, Are your students learning anything? has got me all reflective. Many rock songs are claimed by religious maniacs to include subliminal messages when played backwards or by missing every sixth word or summat, but others are more easily deciphered. As TEFL anthems go, perhaps one of the most memorably haunting has to be Dave Gilmour/Roger Waters' bitterly ironic collaboration reflecting on TEFL one-to-one classes being taught abroad , Wish You Were Here : How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here. As TEFL mongers we often feel like we're in a fish bowl, year after year , not least because the majority of our students exhibit the retention capacities of the goldfish. After painstakingly explaining that we use the preposition to after various verbs, the ...
14 comments
Read more

I AM OFFICIALLY A TIT

Show recently extracted the wind from my sails with typically well-intentioned down-to-earthism. Armed with several diagrams and a kitchen knife , she extolled her opinion that I should concentrate on doing what I can do and stop fannying around trying to learn how to do things I can’t , in yet another feeble-minded attempt to divorce myself from TEFL. Yet again, I believe her to be right. It all started back in May, when I went to Poland with my male voice choir and on the plane to Frankfurt found myself sitting next to Jetro, one of our second tenors. I’d never really spoken to him before, but during the trip I discovered that he ran a small yet growing Internet company , an online system through which owners of used car dealerships could manage their businesses. He explained how previously he’d been something of a factotum, working around the country in various jobs and starting various businesses, until he discovered that he could neither work for somebody nor manage others –...
16 comments
Read more