FAULT-FINDER’ GUIDE TO ENGLISH

In editing text you need to be able to spot a variety of errors and misuses that can crop up in copy. Some of these faults are grammatical – even the best writers go through life with blind spots from when young – and others are to do with the use and meaning of words.

Newspapers respond to new usages that are part of a growing world use of English. These usages reflect popular expressions and vogue words and the subtle shifts of meanings that stem from the spoken language and the influence of commerce and technology. To pick a way through this minefield and decide when a new usage of phrase or word is acceptable is more difficult for the grammarian than for the journalist since the grammarian acts as the custodian of the language. The journalist is merely using it to an end.

Even so there has to be consistency and acceptability in the way language is used if the journalist is to communicate properly with the reader. This is important where copy, even though well written, has to be condensed without loss of meaning, words and phrases substituted to save space, ambiguity excised and order imposed on stories that might have a variety of copy sources and a changing slot-length in a page.

This selection and condensation can lead the unwary sub into error when time is short. Stories cannot be left with difficult sentences, misleading punctuation or words that do not make clear the writer’s intentions. The subeditor must ensure not only that the text gets through to the reader in a readable form, but that the best use is made of the space given to it. The following guidance on language is given with this purpose in mind.

The sentence

Good sentence structure is the key to good writing. All sentences must have a subject and a verb. The verb, if need be, can be qualified by an adverb:

Subject	Verb	Adverb
The policeman	walked	quickly.

The sentence can also have an object:

The policeman walked quickly towards the boy (object).

Newspapers, and some fiction writers, allow the subject to be implied in certain cases, and sometimes even the verb. This can work provided the sense makes the subject clear to the reader:

The policeman walked quickly. Too quickly (he walked).
They did everything to give him a day full of activity. How full a day (they gave him).

The use of an implied subject is a device that can give pace to a narrative provided it is clear who or what is the subject. It is best used to produce a special effect. If over-used, or used without justification in place of conventional structure, it becomes a tiresome mannerism.

Where a verb is inactive (where it expresses a state of being or feeling) it takes a complement in place of an object. For example:

Subject	Verb	Complement
The girl	felt	happy.

It is important to know which is the subject of a sentence because the verb must agree with it in person and number. In person the verb changes only in the third person singular:

I move      He, she or it moves      They move

Agreement in number, however, can cause problems. Where a sentence has a double subject the verb must be plural, as in:

Oil and water do not mix.

Where words are joined to the subject by a preposition the subject remains singular as in:

Iron, with copper, is the most important metal.

In neither-nor or either-or sentences the verb agrees in number with the subject nearest to it as in:

Neither John nor his brother is a member.
Neither Helen nor her sisters are going.

Beware of pitfalls with numbers and quantities. Use fewer than for numbers as in:

There were fewer than fifty copies left.

Use less than for amounts or quantities.

There was less than a quorum so the meeting was abandoned.

Generally numbers used as terms of measurement are singular:

There was ten pence in the hat,

but:

there were ten pennies.

None as a subject generally means not one and should be treated as singular.

Thirty years ago there were many fishing families in the village. Now there is none.

Words like politics, mumps, graphics and acrobatics should be treated as singular despite ending in an s.

Participles

Participles such as having, going, running, turning etc. are said to be left dangling in sentences in which the writer has failed to identify the subject. For example:

Having addressed the meeting for two hours, an interval was then agreed.

The subject is the person addressing the meeting, but who was it that agreed the interval?

Passing quickly through the agenda it was then the turn of the treasurer to give his report.

Was it the treasurer who passed quickly through the agenda?

A dangling participle is a certain cause of confusion to the reader and a fault that crops up in the copy of inexperienced writers.

Pronouns

The main fault in the use of pronouns occurs in constructions in which the writer has failed to relate them properly to their antecedents. For example:

Helen cooked for her sister her favourite meal.

Whose favourite meal?

The general looked at his aide grimly. His eyes were half closed.

Whose eyes?

If there is any doubt about the identity of possessive pronouns (his, her or its), or personal pronouns (me, you, him, her), reshape the sentence or split it in two.

Confusion of me and I is a pitfall. Broadly the rules are these: where the first person pronoun is the subject of the sentence it should be I. Where it is the object of the sentence it should be me. Thus ‘It affects you and me,’ is correct; but you would say ‘You and I are good friends’ because you and I become a double subject – you are a good friend and lama good friend. I should be used and not me following a conjunction, as in:

‘He is as baffled as I (am),’ not ‘as baffled as me.’

‘He is younger than I (am)’ not ‘younger than me.’

Confusion between who and whom is more deeply ingrained. As a very loose guide, one says to whom, from whom, by whom, of whom and than whom, using who in most other cases. Thus whom is used in a sentence when it is preceded by a preposition. A trick is to substitute he for who and him for whom in your mind and see how the sentence works out. I did not know he was the one’ would indicate that I did not know whom was the one’ could not possibly be correct. And so on.

A difficulty with pronouns is highlighted by the following passage: ‘When a young journalist starts his or her first job it is necessary that he or she should learn to take a competent note. If any problem crops up, especially over court hearings, he or she will be asked to substantiate…etc’

The glaring fact shown here is that the English language lacks a singular pronoun of common sex for use where the references are to either sex.

Otto Jesperson, in Growth and Structure of the English Language, refers to the three available makeshift alternatives – using he or she, they, or just the universal he in general references. Sir Ernest Gower, in The Complete Plain Words, is not happy with they or them. ‘Each insisted on their own point of view, and hence the marriage came to an end.’ He says this usage is not defensible, though he concedes that ‘necessity may force it into the category of accepted idiom.’

Strunk and White, in The Elements of Style, say boldly: ‘The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginning of the English language. He has lost all suggestions of maleness in these circumstances.’ They go on: ‘The furore recently raised about he would be more impressive if there were a handy substitute for the word. Unfortunately there isn’ t.’

Quite. Meanwhile this writer and others do all they can to recast sentences so as to ward off the dreaded choice.

Which or that – an old bogey in sentence construction. A general guide is that which must be used in a commenting clause. Example: This should go to the news desk, which deals with these matters.’ In a defining clause which or that is correct as in, ‘The committee that/which dealt with the matter has been disbanded.’(See under Punctuation, pages 100–6.)

‘The man that deals with the matter’ and ‘the man who deals with the matter’ are equally correct in a defining clause.

Sir Ernest Gowers favours the use of that where the choice is justified in making for a smoother sentence. He also says that either should be dropped in sentences that sound right without, the ear being the guide. This is useful advice. Thus you could trim the sentence, I think that the record which he wants is the one that is in that box,’ to say, I think the record he wants is the one in that box.’

The above sentence reminds us of the awkward fact that the word that, unlike which, can serve as a conjunction, a relative pronoun and an adjective.

Tenses

The necessary thing is to be consistent in the use of tenses. Beware of captions that are in the present tense. Try to avoid:

Elizabeth Taylor arrives at London Airport when she came to attend the premiere of…etc’

If an interview is in the present tense, do not allow she says in one part and she said in another.

Do not mix past and perfect tenses in one sentence:

‘I went there because I have been thinking that I should like to see her.’

A muddle of tenses like this is best resolved by recasting the sentence:

‘I went there because I thought I should like to see her.’

The verb to be can cause complications in the lesser-used tenses. Note that I was and he/she was in the simple past tense becomes (if) I were and (if) he/she were in the past subjunctive. Reserve the were in this sort of usage for unlikely or conjectural situations, for example: ‘If I were the Prime Minister…’ The if is not necessary in a sentence such as, ‘Suppose he were the Prime Minister.’

A good tip is that tenses should relate to the tense of the governing (introductory) verb of a news story, which is usually in the past tense. Allow for differences in tense in quoted speech but, at the end of the quoted passage revert to the governing tense. An exception to this would be any reference to a permanent truth. For example, ‘He said that the world is round,’ is preferable to, ‘He said that the world was round.’

On the whole, try to keep tenses simple. Recast sentences where there are complications.

Verbs

The worrying thing about verbs is the rate at which new ones are being formed from nouns. A story full of containerize, hospitalize, civilianize, servicize, anathematize and peripheralize can mesmerize. Many of the ize or ise verbs enable complicated things to be said briefly and should not be rejected but writers should guard against using so many that the text becomes jargonized. It is up to the grammarians to decide how many of these creations are accepted into the language, but the subeditor could strike a blow for sanity by, for instance, substituting moisten for moisturize, complete for finalize and curse for anathematize.

News stories have more pace and immediacy if verbs are used wherever possible in the active voice rather than the passive – ‘The policeman saw the boy,’ not ‘the boy was seen by the policeman. For use of verbs in headlines see pages 126–7.

Two constructions seem to give some writers trouble: the use of shall or will in the future tense of verbs, and the use of lay or lie in the verb to lie (down).

Shall is normally used in the first person singular and plural as in I shall’ and ‘we shall,’ while the second and third person singular and plural take will, as in ‘he will,’ you will,’ and ‘they will.’ This order can be reversed in emphatic statements such as I will go!’ or ‘You shall win through!’

In the verb to lie (down), say ‘He lay down…’ (intransitive) but ‘He laid down rules.…’ (transitive). Say ‘You should lie down,’ not ‘You should lay down,’ unless the use is transitive, as in ‘You should lay down rules.’

Split infinitives

The infinitive of a verb is its basic form: to be, to go, to take, etc. Splitting the infinitive means inserting an adverb between the particle ‘to’ and the verb, as in to quickly go, to quietly take, to always be. People are no longer scandalized by the breaking of the old grammatical rule that infinitives should not be split in this way as when H. G. Fowler first suggested it in his Modern English Usage in the 1920s.

Conveying the correct meaning is the important thing, yet this can usually be done without splitting the infinitive. ‘To further improve the working of the engine,’ makes just as much sense and makes for a smoother sentence if worded, ‘to improve further the working of the engine.’ If we mean there is a further intention to improve the working of the engine, then ‘further’ must go before the infinitive as in ‘further to improve.’

‘The purpose of a drug is to better deal with hay fever’ would sound and look better by not splitting the infinitive and saying ‘to deal better with hay fever’ or even ‘to deal with hay fever better’.

There is also the question of stress and scansion. ‘For man to boldly move towards his future’ has a metrical ring absent from ‘For man to move boldly (or boldly to move) towards his future.’ On these grounds, although they are unlikely to affect most newspaper writing, the infinitive might reasonably be split. In the vast majority of sentences the separating adverb can be placed outside the infinitive, as shown above, with little or no damage to the sentence or danger of ambiguity. R.W. Burchfield, editor of the third edition of Modern English Usage (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996) supports this view when he says, ‘Avoid splitting infinitives whenever possible, but do not suffer undue remorse if a split infinitive is unavoidable for the natural and unambiguous completion of a sentence already begun.’

Qualifiers

These are words that vary or extend the meaning of the noun or verb and they are of two sorts: adjectives and adverbs.

Adjectives, which qualify the noun, are frequently the most expendable words in a text since an excess of them slows down the writing and takes up space. Many, such as in luxury flat, stunning blonde, staggering sum, hush-hush inquiry, vital clues and burly policeman are among the most tired and overused words to be found in newspapers. Many, as in surprise swoop, brutal murder and secret hideaway, are tautological as well as brain-lulling.

It is in the use of adjectives that newspapers, instead of expanding the frontiers of language, seem to be shrinking them. It is a useful exercise for a subeditor, as well as a writer, to cast out all the above listed adjectives and go for some that more precisely qualify the noun or, if nothing comes to mind, go without. Twenty adjectives saved in a column of type will make room for a one-paragraph news item. Over the page this amount of word saving could allow in an important extra news story.

Here are some usages that could be pensioned off with little loss:

I leave the reader to add to this list, but you see the idea.

A fault to look for is the tendency of some writers to limit or extend absolute adjectives. You cannot qualify absolute, basic, essential, final, ideal, unique and ultimate. Almost unique or partly ideal are a nonsense. You cannot be more basic than basic.

Adjectives/adverbs such as very, rather and quite can be debilitating to the text and read like the extension into writing of verbal props. The high incidence of quite is (quite) extraordinary.

Adverbs qualify the verb and other adjectives by words such as occasionally, rightly, severely, half-heartedly, simply, implicitly, purely and finally. Be certain to put the adverb in its right position. ‘You can quickly teach dogs to do tricks,’ is not the same as, ‘you can teach dogs quickly to do tricks.’ Be certain of what you are trying to say.

Nouns

These offer fewer problems than do other ingredients of a sentence. The use of collectives nouns is covered above under ‘subject,’ and of possessives later under ‘punctuation.’ Plural forms of nouns can give difficulty. The ey endings as in valley and money take an s; y endings without a preceding vowel change to ies.

Oes and os endings: the commoner two and three-syllable words such as tomato, potato and hero take oes. Long words, particularly imported ones such as archipelago and gigolo, and also proper nouns such as Lothario, all take os endings. Words with a vowel before the o such as cameo, intaglio and imbroglio take os, as do abbreviated words such as photo.

Foreign words: many Anglicized ones, among them sanatorium, syllabus, terminus and ultimatum, take a simple s or es ending. Some French- and Latin-based ones, however, keep their own plurals. These include:

Beware of words such as medium which becomes mediums for clairvoyants and media for methods of mass communication; series which remains series, fish which can be fish or fishes, and folk which can be folk or folks.

A blight that afflicts current English is the growth of polysyllabic nouns derived from the new generation of ize verbs, themselves often derived from shorter nouns. Thus we get:

container	containerize	containerization
hospital	hospitalize	hospitalization
moisture	moisturize	moisturization

With casual, casualize and casualization comes a more advanced growth: de-casualization. We are only one step from de-containerization, de-hospitalization and de-moisturization. The space saved by using such monster words is wasted if the reader is lulled into insensibility before the end of the sentence. It is better to take up a bit more space and use a few short simple words to explain what you mean and this avoids jargonization.

Prepositions

The rule never to end a sentence with a preposition can be broken without ill-effect in sentences such as ‘She’s the wife he goes home to,’ or ‘She’s dating the chap she works with.’ It would sound pedantic to say ‘She’s the wife to whom he goes home,’ or ‘She’s dating the chap with whom she works.’

Most uses of prepositions with nouns and verbs (conform to, connive at, taste of, taste for, consequent upon, etc.) are idiomatic and have to be learned.

Other sentence tips

  Sentences can be made nonsensical through a misplaced clause or phrase: ‘For the third time a baby was trapped in a washing machine at…’ Same baby? Or: ‘There was a discussion about rape in the staff room,’ or ‘It carried an important article about adultery by the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

  The non-sequitur can strike: ‘Injured in the fighting in Korea, Joe Bloggs retired last week.’ The second clause bears no relation to the first.

  If correcting the grammar of a sentence makes it sound stiff or pedantic it is better to re-write it until it sounds right.

Length

Because of narrow newspaper columns, short sentences and paragraphs are preferred in order to avoid an unbroken density of type. This does not mean that all sentences must be short, just that shortness is an advantage to the scanning eye. Short sentences mean generally less complicated sentences with fewer clauses and less punctuation so that meanings can be got over to the reader more quickly, so there is an advantage in comprehension, too.

Short sentences are also faster and more graphic for the telling of hard news stories. Here is an example from the London Evening Standard:

POLICE fought a gun battle with an armed gang in an East London square today.

It happened as a team of marksmen from the Central Robbery Squad were keeping watch on four men suspected of plotting an armed raid.

But the gang realized they were trapped and opened fire with shotguns. The police returned the fire.

Three shots were fired by police, but no one was hurt. One of the officers, however, was taken to hospital suffering from shock.

A police motorcycle was damaged during the skirmish.

It happened soon after 9 a.m. in Carlton Square, Stepney. Police later recovered three shotguns from the scene of the shooting.

Four men were this afternoon being questioned.

Note how short words, as well as short sentences and paragraphs, give pace to the action-filled story. Of 117 words, 74 (or 63 per cent) are words of one syllable.

It would be boring, however, to have nothing but short sentences in news stories. It can fall to you, as the subeditor, to decide in wordier texts when longer sentences are justifiable or when – for the reasons just given – a sentence should be split, with a little recasting, into two or more sentences.

Here, from The Times (see Figure 42), is a story in which a slower pace is needed and into which longer sentences and paragraphs fit naturally:

A puff of wind and the ingenuity of an Australian inventor may have produced the answer for amateur golfers who dream of shaving a few strokes off their handicaps. Roy Halle, a 55-year-old mechanical engineer from Sydney, claims that the answer to millions of golfing prayers lies in a weighted hat.

Even better news for those familiar with the disappointment of yet another false golfing dawn is that Mr Halle’s Inertia Golf Hat contains no hidden catches. There is no need for a new grip, deep breathing or positive swing thoughts: just pop the hat on and, as Mr Halle promises, the strokes will follow.

The idea for the invention came about partly by accident, when Mr Halle was playing golf on a stormy day on a course in New South Wales, one of the finest in Australia.

Figure 42 Style and pace in writing: an example from the world of golf see page 97. (Courtesy The Times)

‘It was blowing a gale and my hat kept flying off,’ he said from his home in Sydney yesterday. ‘So the next day I attached some solder wire to the brim to weigh it down and keep it on my head. Before I knew it, my game started to get better by quantum leaps and I realized it could only be my hat.’

Flushed with his discovery, Mr Halle, whose handicap has dropped from 14 to 9 in 12 months, took his idea to a patent lawyer. Six months ago, after carrying out detailed research, he founded the Stability Golf Company and started selling the hats at A$40 (£15.50) each, etc.

The gentle pace and slow telling is totally acceptable in this type of news story and allows the writer a touch of self-indulgent humour, while keeping to the facts.

Where the pace of a story demands shorter sentences, or where the sentences are just unacceptably long, you should avoid the easy option of splitting a sentence by turning its clauses into sentences beginning with an And or a But. Recasting will produce a better flow as well as better grammar. It is considered acceptable in newspaper journalism to begin sentences with And or But, but it should be done sparingly to produce a particular effect of continuity within the context of sentence pauses, rather than as a device to break up long sentences by replacing commas with full stops.

Paragraphs

This is a thorny subject in newspapers. H. W. Fowler (of Modern English Usage) was right when he said: ‘The paragraph is essentially a unit of thought, not of length; it must be homogeneous in subject matter and sequential in treatment.’ But he also said: ‘The purpose of a paragraph is to give the reader a rest.’ With narrow columns to fill, newspaper editors tend to give more stress to the second function, and paragraphing has come to be used to break up the text into readable nuggets rather than to mark thought and fact sequences.

With more display in modern newspapers has come a reaction against the style of only a few decades ago of columns of unbroken reading matter with few paragraphs. This has become exaggeratedly so in the popular tabloids where it is assumed readers are as allergic to long paragraphs as they are to long words. Taken too far on this premise, paragraphing can finish up identifying with sentences, however short; continuity of thought and fact are abandoned and the text is read in a series of quick jumps. Here, the plethora of indented and broken lines becomes as big a handicap to the scanning eye as solid text was.

The middle way between the desiderata of Fowler and the projection requirements of modern newspapers is to try to relate the visual breaks as closely as possible to breaks in the sense of the text. This is not usually difficult in the

economic style of newswriting common to most newspapers, though bad breaks will still occur if excessively long paragraphs are to be avoided.

Worse than breaking a paragraph in mid-thought is connecting two ill-matched thoughts or sentences into one paragraph, or ending a quotation and starting a description or a new quotation in the same paragraph. This can happen during page make-up when the page editor might run two paragraphs together so that a story carried in a number of legs across the page can show a full line at the top of each leg and not a ‘widow’ or jack-line.

The idea is to give a neat printed effect so that the eye does not turn to the top of a leg on to a broken line. Yet the yoking together of two unsequential paragraphs for this purpose frustrates the intention of the writer and can damage the sense of the text.

As in the examples quoted, the length of paragraphs can be varied to suit the text. Action-based stories can be given pace through short paragraphs as well as short sentences, while more leisurely stories such as accounts of ceremonials, royal occasions, functions etc., or those requiring explanations, can give the descriptive writer the benefit of longer paragraphs for a slower telling.

Punctuation

Many ambiguities and misunderstood sentences are caused by faults in punctuation, particularly in the use of commas, either wrongly placed or removed. To say, ‘The people who arrived because of the rain were accommodated in tents,’ is not the same, for example, as saying, ‘The people who arrived, because of the rain, were accommodated in tents.’ In the first sentence the arrival of the people was brought about by the rain. ‘Because of the rain,’ is a defining clause. In the second sentence, ‘because of the rain’ is incidental. It is therefore called a commenting clause and is bounded by two commas. These commas make all the difference to the meaning.

Take a sentence that might occur in a murder story; ‘Jones killed his son because, he said, there was nothing to live for.’ Then write it without the commas. Immediately the phrase ‘there is nothing to live for’ is transferred from Jones to his son. The meaning has totally changed.

Punctuation in newspaper texts is more concerned with clarifying meanings and avoiding ambiguities than in providing natural pauses, although the two purposes can coincide in longer sentences.

The old rule that commas should not precede the conjunctions and and but is generally worth keeping but the subeditor should be on guard for cases where the sense of a sentence requires a comma. In some cases but introduces new information or a new thought and a comma pause can mark this helpfully as in,

‘Yes, I think I ought to go, but I must be certain to get permission first.’

A comma is not needed in these sentences: ‘It was not only the colour but the texture that turned her against it.’ ‘He reached the top of the steps and turned to the left.’

Yet here is a case where the meaning hinges on the placing of a comma: ‘They gave the prize to Jones, and his wife and the family were delighted.’ Without the comma the reader would be at a loss to know whether Jones or Jones and his wife had won the prize.

Commas can be used to give stress to words and adverbial phrases. ‘This was, evidently, the truth,’ gives more stress to an important adverb than ‘This was evidently the truth.’ They are also used to separate items in a list, but their use to separate strings of adjectives is becoming less common and is not essential.

If a sentence contains an ambiguity because of the bad use of commas (or for any other reason) that cannot be resolved by reference to the context, for your own good you should refer back to the writer. A guess could land you in trouble.

There is no need of a comma between a house number and a street. Thus: 14 Coronation Street.

Full stop

Its use to indicate abbreviations as in Feb. and the Rev. is generally accepted but not in abbreviations where the first and last letters of the full word appear, as in Cpl, Mr, Dr etc. (For abbreviations see under ‘house style.’)

A full stop is not used at the end of captions or in headlines (except in rare cases where a long quotation becomes a headline).

Semi-colon

It denotes a pause longer than a comma but not as long as a full stop. In books and in feature writing there is still room for the semi-colon by stylists who know how to use it and have scope for polishing a sentence, but in news writing there is not a lot of call for it. It is sometimes used when a comma or a full stop would have been adequate and its presence can be sign that a sentence is getting too long.

A semi-colon serves a useful purpose in subdividing lists as in ‘…east wing: three bedrooms, two with bathrooms; three dressing rooms, one with balcony; two staircases, one at either end, and a staff rest room

Colon

This is a necessary but not often used punctuation mark in newspapers. Use it to introduce lists of names, objects, qualities etc., and in front of a quotation or explanation. It is pointless to have a colon followed by a dash for this purpose. Its use in a sentence to indicate a pause longer than a semi-colon but shorter than a full stop is now so rare, even outside newspapers, as to be almost extinct.

Dashes and brackets

Dashes are much overused and misused in newspapers on the assumption that they jolly up the text, and their rise in favour is in contrast to the decline in the amount of punctuation used generally. Here are some actual examples in newspapers of how dashes were employed:

‘A bungling bandit robbed a bank – and left his chequebook behind.’

‘Across the country heavy rain washed out the end of the Bank Holiday – and downpours were blamed for a series of crashes. Twenty-nine day-trippers were hurt – one seriously – when their coach hit a truck in Leicestershire.’

‘When you crash-diet, your body reacts as it would do in an emergency – it burns muscle for energy and starts storing fat for long-term energy use. In this way, a person can lose almost half a stone in one week – but it’s the wrong sort of weight you are losing.’

‘Three more were arrested at Blackpool – one of the seaside towns named in the IRA ‘hit list’. The new arrests – they bring the total now detained to 16 – came after a police swoop at a house in James Gray Street, Glasgow – less than a mile from the tenement raided at the weekend.’

The first example shows the dash being used to draw attention to the telling part of the sentence. This is the most justifiable in these quoted. In the second example the three dashes should clearly have been commas.

The third example appears at first sight to have a 28-word parenthesis taking up more than half the paragraph. Not so. Using a colon instead of the first dash would have made it clearer that an explanation was following. This then liberates

the second dash in the paragraph to draw attention to the concluding point being made.

The worst misuse of dashes appears in the fourth example. Here the punctuation in two consecutive sentences consists of two full stops, a set of inverted commas, one comma and four dashes. The result is almost unreadable. The first dash should have been a comma. The second pair encloses an unnecessary parenthesis. The words could have read ‘…arrests, which bring the total now detained to 16, came…’ without taking up any more words. The final dash in this sentence comes so quickly that the reader is in doubt as to which dash ends the parenthesis. Here a comma would have been sufficient, although of the four dashes used it is the one most justified by the sense.

Using dashes for commas is not only grammatically wrong, it is confusing to the eye, space-taking and it devalues the dash as a significant text mark. It has resulted in the use of dashes being banned by some editors.

You can reasonably use dashes to enclose a parenthesis, though they are more space-taking than brackets. Grammarians are divided as to whether dashes or brackets signify the greater interruption. Whichever method is used, the words contained in the parentheses should be a comment or fact outside the flow of the sentence, but which the reader needs in order to digest its full import. Office style should insist that you stick consistently either to dashes or brackets for parentheses (some newspapers, in fact, shy off brackets, although they are shorter). In any case it is best to use parentheses sparingly. They impede the flow of the text and often indicate that writers have not got their thoughts properly together.

Ellipsis

This much misused punctuation mark is supposed to show that letters or words are missing. Missing letters: ‘According to the gamekeeper the man shouted,’ You f…pig,’ and vanished.’ Missing words: ‘There could have been a different ending had Helen only…but that is another story.’

It might be deduced from these examples that there is little use for ellipses in newspapers, yet they have become as pervasive as dashes. Here are some that appeared:

‘A pony runs free through a meadow…dramatically reprieved from death at the eleventh hour.’

‘“Oh Gawd…” said Geldof when I cornered him.’

The first example seems to show an ellipsis being used in place of a dash to point a sentence since there are clearly neither letters nor words missing. The second seems to be in place of an exclamation mark.

Some newspapers even use ellipses to enclose a parenthesis instead of dashes or brackets. There are four points to be made here:

1  It is inconsistent to use a dash and an ellipsis to point sentences in different parts of the same newspaper.

2  An ellipsis is not suitable for this purpose in any case since it is supposed to denote missing letters or words.

3  Ellipses print badly on long print runs and sometimes the dots disappear from the page leaving mysterious blanks.

4  An ellipsis is the most space-taking of all punctuation marks and should be avoided for this reason unless needed for its correct purpose.

Exclamation mark

Sometimes called a screamer, the exclamation mark used to be a favourite of tabloid headline hacks and blurb writers who treated it as the magic cypher readers wouldn’t be able to resist. Overuse has debased it. A recent edition of The Sun had only two headline screamers and the Daily Mail on the same day none.

There is a simple rule about an exclamation mark which should save a lot of trouble: it should be used only after an exclamation. It is unlikely that a phrase more than four or five words long could qualify as an exclamation by reason of the simple mechanics of delivery. Generally it is couched as warning, a demand, a brief instruction or an ejaculation.

Apostrophe

These should be used before the s in singular possessives and after the s in plural possessives ending in s:

boy’ s    boys’

A common mistake is to fail to add an s after the apostrophe in proper noun possessives of names ending in s:

James’ s	Peebles’ s
Francis’ s	Lagos’ s

Note that the plural form of James and Jones and similar proper names adds es as in Jameses and Joneses.

Some well-known place names containing possessives drop the apostrophe, for example St Albans and Earls Court. A gazetteer should be consulted for these.

The apostrophe’s original purpose of denoting missing letters is shown in use in don’ t, won’ t, can’t and it’s (it is). In the case of possessive pronouns it has fallen out of use in his, hers, yours, theirs and ours, but is retained in one’ s.

There is no justification for using an apostrophe in plurals such as MP’ s, all the three’ s, or in expressions such as ten years’ imprisonment or three weeks’ leave, which are best regarded as adjectival phrases. If there is doubt as to whether an apostrophe is needed, be guided by the sense. If the meaning is intact without it, leave it out.

Quotation marks

Inverted commas enclosing quotations can be single or double according to style. Most newspapers use double, although allowing single in headlines. The usual style in text is to have double inverted commas for main quotes, single ones for quotes within quotes, and double again for quotes within quotes within quotes (an extremity to avoid).

Check quotation marks carefully in copy to see that statements are properly attributed and so the reader knows where a quotation begins and ends. This is especially important in quotes within quotes where sloppy editing can leave bugs. Use a colon to introduce main quotations. For short ones in the run of a sentence or paragraph a comma is sufficient at the beginning and end. For example: The constable said he heard a voice say, ‘Come quickly,’ as he walked past the building.

Question mark

A fault to look for is a misplaced question mark in a sentence containing a quoted passage. If the quotation itself is a question, the question mark must come inside the closing inverted commas. If the question lies in the main sentence, then the question mark must come outside the inverted commas as in: ‘Do you think it wrong to say, “No children will be admitted”?’ The correct position can make a difference to the sense.

Hyphens

This maligned punctuation mark should be used sparingly but is sometimes crucial to the sense. In line with the move towards less punctuation newspapers have discarded it in familiar compounded words such as lowline, overuse, boyfriend, checklist, wartime, gasfilled, nosebag and handbag, but have kept it for co-operative, co-pilot, co-ordinate, ill-used and other words where its absence might confuse.

Use hyphens:

  To avoid ambiguity in some adjectival phrases, as between ‘a model-manufacturing technique’ and ‘a model manufacturing technique’, and ‘a lost-business file’ and ‘a lost business file.’

  To indicate a compounded adjective as in ‘an up-to-date-method’ or ‘an away-from-it-all holiday,’ but not in ‘the method was up to date.’

  To distinguish different meanings of words as in re-formed and reformed, and re-creation and recreation.

Hyphens, as with other punctuation marks, are discouraged in headlines to preserve visual neatness, but have an important use in typesetting systems to break words at the end of lines when justifying setting widths. It is not typographical style (or easy to read) to break a word in mid-syllable to justify a line, or to break proper nouns if avoidable.