Don’t shriek
THE OLD MAN moved slowly out of the darkness. ‘Hey! Stop! It’s me! Don’t shoot!’ Greg peered into the gloom and lowered his gun. It was his father! Exclamation marks – or ‘shrieks’, as they’re known in the newspaper business – are perfectly acceptable in speech. None of those four short exclamations would make sense […]
Dash it all
TAKE A LOOK: -, – and — all look more or less the same. But the hyphen, en dash and em dash behave differently. A hyphen is placed between co-joined parts of a word (see what I did there?). An en dash is used to signify a change of direction in a sentence – such […]
Mr but Prof.
SOME ABBREVIATIONS require a full stop after them, and some don’t. How can you tell? Why is ‘Mister’ abbreviated to ‘Mr’, when abbreviating ‘Professor’ to ‘Prof.’ requires one? There’s a simple rule. If the abbreviation ends in the same letter as the word it’s contracting, then no full stop is needed. So Dr Kildare doesn’t […]
“You can quote me”
YOU’LL HAVE SEEN QUOTATION MARKS around the most unlikely of phrases. Their proper use is to indicate that a saying has been first pronounced by someone else: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” as Polonius said. It all dates back to Aristotle, who called this technique one of the five non-technical proofs of rhetoric (the technical […]