Re: Re Is it a M$ world?

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

Jo Beverley wrote:
> You edit a newsletter for copy editors? Can you get a message out to whoever it
> is keeps putting semicolons in novels written in natural narrative voice?
> Especially annoying when she/he does it in dialogue.
I was going to answer this offlist, but we have a lot of writers and
editors here, so let's make it a free-for-all.
One of the things editors have to be aware of is the differences between
the spoken and the written word. Each has its own strengths and
weaknesses, and ways of compensating for the latter. The spoken language
supplements and clarifies words with stress, intonation, pauses, and
even body English; the written uses punctuation, capitalization, and
typography (e.g., itals for emphasis). It is possible to have a sentence
that is perfectly clear as written, but utterly incomprehensible when
spoken, and vice versa. (For an example of the first, take Kipling's
"But Holy State, we have lived to learn/Endeth in wholly slave." That is
probably graspable by a Brit, when spoken, because they can say and hear
a differece between h and wh; Americans for the most part cannot and
would say, "Huh?")
So though punctuation does not directly represent pauses in speech, they
are often used for the same purpose. Unfortunatly, the comma has two
common uses in English that cause a real problem: to separate
appositives and to separate the members of a series. Suppose a character
in a novel is reported as saying the following: "Oh everyone was there:
the Lord Chancellor, his mother-in-law, the Dowager Duchess of
Cumberland, Admiral Sir Richard Founder and his lady, and her sister,
the Countess of Errol, and her nephew the MP for Bristol." How many
personages have we named? Is the Dowager Duchess the Lord Chancellor's
mother-in-law, or was the mother-in-law not named? Is the Countess of
Erroll Sir Richard's sister-in-law? That sentence absolutely cries out
for semicolons, which do the work that would be done by pauses and
shadings of voice were the sentence read aloud. The author who wrote it
knows who's who; but the reader may not (especially if it comes early in
the novel or if the parties named are just window dressing). And it is
the copy editor's job to make sure that the reader understands what the
author intended. Think of those semicolons, which look so stuffy to you,
as the equivalent of pauses, changes in pitch, and all the other tools
that the spoken word has and the written lacks.

Patricia M. Godfrey