[...]... clauses with different subjects It' s fine to write: I went to town, bought a suit and came home but not: I went to town, you were on the same train too The comma is too weak a pause for this: readers need to know there's a serious shift in sense coming up, to say to themselves, 'There's one unit of information, and now here's a different unit of information.' The job for this sort of break goes to the... bears the strapline 'The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation') But only a little There are rules, and they need to be adhered to The most important thing to understand about punctuation is that it' s not some kind of test, but a tool to make your writing clearer If you could write crystal-clear prose that used no punctuation at all, that would be fine Sadly, however, you can't Another 'big four' There... words, parsing Like all revolutionaries, we need to get some basic training in first So off to boot camp! You' re allowed to groan at this point My students normally do 'We did all this stuff at school!' That's just what I thought when 1 decided to teach writing and sat down to create a course in what I thought I already knew – and found that there was a huge amount that I only half understood Those basic... one morning to find not thirty-odd but thirty odd people waiting for her surgery The three dots at the end of that last paragraph are called an ellipsis The sense is of something more to be said, but left out because the reader either knows it already, or can guess It is sometimes overused in literary writing, to sound profound – which it can do, the first few times the author uses it Inverted commas... nouns (loving you is easy), of adverbs (the meals arrived right on time) , or of adjectives (delirious with joy, he leapt into the Thames) A fragment is a phrase dressed up as a sentence – in other words beginning with a capital and ending with a full stop, but lacking a finite verb Tony Blair's speeches, especially at the start of his time as PM, were full of these 'New Labour (Pause) New Britain (Pause)... tendency for hyphens to vanish over time: when I was young, the local town had a by-pass built round it Recently that has become so clogged that it' s in need of a bypass Hyphens are useful in preventing confusion One must assume that strict moralists approve of people having extra marital sex (as opposed to extra-marital sex), as that keeps married couples together and happy But pity the doctor who arrived... of magnitude From lowest to highest they are: • comma • semicolon PUNCTUATION • colon • full stop Think of them as 'units of pause' A comma is one unit, a semicolon two units, a colon three units, and a full stop is four Or, more subtly, a semicolon is two units and a colon two-and-a-half, jumping to four for the full stop Not everybody agrees with this The 'units of pause' idea is regarded as too simple,... general' So we visit Doctor Smith, but we don't go to see the Doctor, just the doctor We say Amelia Jones is Managing Director of Associated Perfumes, but that most company managing directors earn over £100,000 a year Even more elevated than the managing director, we pray to God, but say that polytheists worship many gods There's a tendency for bad writers to overuse capitals in the attempt to look important... The comma is the basic unit of pause Its main use is to divide a complex sentence into its basic parts I will arrive tomorrow, if that is convenient for you By capitalising expenses such as research or certain types of training, one can make the balance sheet of a company look much healthier than it actually is In the first example, the comma is grammatically necessary, as it separates two clauses,... worry too much about the technicalities Groups of words If the word is the basic unit of sense in a piece of writing, the unit at the next level up is the sentence We all know what a sentence is, don't we? No Double-checking when writing this book, I looked in various sources and found totally different definitions One said 'anything beginning with a capital letter and ending in a proper mark (usually . punctuation, writing so full of padding you want to pop it with a pin, writing that wanders aimlessly, writing that deliberately obfuscates in order to deceive. All such writing is at best impolite and. parsing Like all revolutionaries, we need to get some basic training in first. So off to boot camp! You& apos;re allowed to groan at this point. My students normally do. 'We did all this stuff. can all do something about this. You& apos;ve started, by picking up this book. I hope you& apos;ll enjoy working through it, and that you& apos;ll keep on referring to it as you develop your