Over the years I’ve highlighted one or two punctuation guides which I’ve found useful in my writing. I’m not a stickler for punctuation rules, but I do believe that you have to understand them before you decide to break them. I’ve spent a few days reading through some of my older pieces of work to see it’s changed over the years (I’ve got a cold and I’m bored – leave me alone), and I’m pleased to see that there is much less that I’d change about my earlier work than I thought. I think my sense of rhythm has improved, and I’m a lot more ruthless in cutting out needless fluff than I used to be. Best of all though, I use a lot less commas.
Category: advice
Dom’s pet hate corner #1
Well, that’s the first one obviously: rogue apostrophes. Let’s leave that one there because I do it a lot myself, but if I don’t pick it up on the read through, my editor grabs it during a review.
The next one is a minor point that many are guilty of, including me. It’s the increasingly common ‘trailing off’ dialogue:
‘But Marion, we can’t just…’
Okay, I don’t have a problem with that, except that it’s often accompanied by a dialogue tag:
‘But Marion, we can’t just…,’ his voice trailed off.