1066. Do you really need that comma? Should your dashes have spaces? Is there ever just one "right" way to punctuate? June Casagrande, author of "The Best Punctuation Book, Period," busts punctuation myths, compares style guides, and looks at the surprising complexity of the humble em dash.
1066. Do you really need that comma? Should your dashes have spaces? Is there ever just one "right" way to punctuate? June Casagrande, author of "The Best Punctuation Book, Period," busts punctuation myths, compares style guides, and looks at the surprising complexity of the humble em dash.
Find June Casagrande at grammarunderground.com.
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with June Casagrande, a language columnist for the Los Angeles Times, author of five books about language, including one of my favorite reference books, The Best Punctuation Book, Period.
June, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
JUNE: Hi, Mignon. Thanks for having me.
MIGNON: You bet. There is a line in your introduction that I want to read to you and then ask you about.
So it says, "A lot of people assume there's a single correct answer for every punctuation conundrum.
Either the comma belongs in a certain place or it doesn't. The good news here is also the bad news. Often, there's more than one right answer. And I want to know why you would ever say that's good news."Â
JUNE: It means you don't have to be exactly right every time. It releases a lot of people, as you know well, who have a lot of anxiety about grammar and punctuation, and there's a right way to do this. And though this is the thing I want to do, I'm not sure it's the single right way. And not only is there a good chance that it is the right way, but your instinct with language is often really—it's often better than you think.
So if you're torn between finding out an absolute, positive, definitive, "there's only one way to do this" correct answer or just saying, "I've been a speaker of this language for a number of years. I've been reading it for a number of years. And my educated gut tells me to do this," it's good news that your educated gut's right nine times out of ten.
MIGNON: Do you find that punctuation, to me it feels like it's a little more susceptible to there being styles than hard and fast rules, that there is more of this, it could be this way or it could be that way? Do you find that true as well?
JUNE: I think it's a lot more prone to hard and fast rules than the language at large because punctuation started as rules. Language started extremely organically. It just grew out of Homo sapiens trying to communicate. Who knows? Maybe Neanderthals trying to communicate. I don't know. But it grew organically. Punctuation is an artificial convention. So unlike language that sort of makes its own rules as it goes, punctuation is rules. And so it varies some from style to style. For example, in the Chicago Manual of Style, which you use if you're editing a book or something similar to a book.
Magazines use it a lot. A dash, an em dash, will not have spaces around it normally. In news style, in the Associated Press Stylebook, dashes do have spaces around them. That's neither right nor wrong. It's an example of what you're talking about, where you've got some play there. But so many things in language, that's where consistency becomes very important, because you don't want, if you want something you're writing to look professional and well thought out. You want those types of decisions to be consistent throughout, and so that's what's important there, but yes, there is a good deal of flexibility.
MIGNON: I'm glad you brought up dashes because that was something I wanted to talk to you about as well. I did a sort of off-the-cuff poll a couple of weeks ago on Threads and Mastodon and just asked people whether they like spaces around dashes or not, and I was really surprised by the results. First, more than 60% of people on both platforms said they prefer spaces, which surprised me because that's AP style.
And generally, people aren't as in favor of AP style; you don't learn that as much in school as you learn something more like Chicago. So I was surprised, but then what surprised me even more was that 12% of the people said it's complicated. They chose the “it's complicated” answer, and they said, so one person said, “it depends on the typeface.”
I think that was the one that surprised me the most. Someone also said, “Oh, it should be like other punctuation,” so no spaces. They thought, “You don't put a space before a comma, a semicolon, or a period, so why on earth would you put one before a dash?” Two people just said that dashes need to breathe.
They just need to breathe. One person said that because when you do handwriting and you make a dash, it looks like there's a space on either side. Then you should do it when you're typing as well. And, let's see, two people said that when you're using ... they use no spaces for formal writing, or for print, they use no spaces, but they use spaces when they're writing online.
So it depended on where they were writing. And I just thought it blew my mind that there were so many different ways of thinking about whether you would put a space around a dash or not. Have you ever encountered this kind of thinking before?
JUNE: Two minds blown. Sign me up for the blown mind. Never had any idea. I tend not to think about stuff because I just follow style books. This must be what taking acid is like. It's like mind-expanding, that, oh, you can actually think about this and think about what's good. Those are all extremely interesting answers, and every single one of them seems to have validity to it. I could make an argument for every single one. Don't know which one I'd pick. I enjoy the lack of freedom of just being told what to do by a style guide.
MIGNON: The one that was also interesting is apparently a couple of people who seemed to be more involved in design said it's about line breaks. If you have a space, then you can get a line break between the word and the dash, which then gives you a dash at the beginning of the next line, which looks really bad.
And so they said, if you use a non-breaking thin space or something like that, then it's okay. But otherwise, if you don't use a space, it makes the word stick together. It doesn't get the break in the weird place. And then apparently they said that's why AP does use spaces, the Associated Press, because newspaper columns are so narrow.
JUNE: Interesting. AP style, I've noticed, tends toward, because they were always doing things on newsprint, on paper, and that's how it all got established. Anything that can save one tiny little agate of space, they do. But it's funny, when I spend all day putting spaces in around em dashes, a lot of the stuff I get is, and then I will see a dash in a book with no spaces around it, and I usually buck against the one that I'm less familiar with, but I'm like, “Oh, it looks so pretty with no spaces.”
The sentence just keeps going; it's smooth. Visually, I think I prefer the one I never get to do much of, which is no spaces around it. But yeah, there are good arguments all around.
MIGNON: Yeah. I prefer spaces because I was raised on AP style, but I've actually been thinking about changing because I do find myself having to put them in so often. Like the people who write for me seem to not like them or do them as I'm always putting them in. Let's talk about, so you mentioned that you work in newspapers and you're a columnist for the L.A. Times. Talk about your column a little bit and how that sort of got you started into book writing.
JUNE: My column is for the Community News Division for the L.A. Times. So it'd be a little bit of false advertising if I were to say I were an L.A. Times person. But I just write about language issues I think people care about. And it started in a community news supplement for the Times in Orange County, California, called The Daily Pilot. Then it expanded to some others, and so now it appears in some others. But community news readers tend to be old. The people who sit down on a Sunday morning with their newspaper and read the grammar column in there tend to be older than the people who, the young people, who are younger than me when I started writing this. And so it started out with a lot of having to defend descriptivist positions because a lot of my readership was very much steeped in the old school. You can't split an infinitive; you can't end a sentence with a preposition. And it was a lot of "gotcha" against, I had to, I was constantly getting emails defending that.
Interestingly, I don't know if you've gotten sick of my saying, "No, they're wrong," or if they got sick of getting used in the column, "Look what Betty Jo in Costa Mesa said. She was wrong." Or if they're just not reading anymore. I don't know, but that has died down a bit. That got me started wanting to write a book because I started out making the column funny, or so I thought, in an early-aughts funny, that sort of Gen X-ie sort of snarky kind of way, which I'm now completely bored with. I don't want to be funny like that anymore, but I thought it would make a fun humor book, and as you know, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," which is a punctuation book by a British writer named Lynne Truss, was extremely popular and successful at the time, and she's very funny.
She's got that dry British wit that I couldn't even aspire to. My humor was, "Let me beat you over the head with that" kind of thing, and hers was very dry. But I aspired to something that was more me. And that's how my first book, "Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies," came about.
MIGNON: That's a lot of fun. And I read in your bio that you have training in improv.
JUNE: I took improv classes for years. I love improv classes. I am not a great improviser. I took classes at the Groundlings and Summit Comedy Sports. And the Groundlings has five levels, and I made it through four, but not to five. And then, but they let you, even after you've officially flunked out, it's your chance to be one of their regular cast members is now that door is closed on you. But they will let you take pay-as-you-go classes, and I kept doing that for what must have been five years, just for the fun of it. Just because it's just so ridiculous and fun.
MIGNON: Yeah. Do you feel like it helped you with your work at all?
JUNE: Probably in ways I don't notice. One of the things they teach you in improv is not what you expect. You think they're going to teach you how to be funny on the cuff and how to be clever and witty. They don't. What they teach you how to do is how to contribute to the spontaneous creation, starting over. They teach you how to contribute to the spontaneous creation of a story. So one person steps on stage and says, “Now listen, Irma. I don't like the way you're windexing that window,” and you say, “Quiet, Dad.” So now this person has identified you as Irma, and you've identified the relationship. That's what they teach you. And funny comes in later as a byproduct, but it teaches you to build a story and build a narrative and add information, and how simply by piling on information you end up with something of substance.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. Your earlier books are quite funny. I like them. They're funny too. But your book, this one, the reference book, I find myself referring to this all the time. Whenever I have a punctuation question, I grab this book because you cover it so well. And one of the things I really like is that you compare the different styles. When there's a difference between AP and Chicago and the others, you highlight that. Can you talk a bit about how you came to constructing the book this way, and maybe were there challenges with doing it that way?
JUNE: It was so hard. It was so labor-intensive. There were challenges. Some of the challenges are, both major style guides have their own dictionaries, and so if the answer isn't in the style guide, you refer to their dictionary. So there are four reference points for every punctuation mark. Is this use, is this hyphenation of, say, the word "makeup"? Is this an AP? No, AP doesn't list this. So now you have to go to AP's dictionary, which at the time was Webster's New World. And Chicago, the Chicago Manual of Style, had a different dictionary, which was Merriam-Webster's. So if it wasn't in there, you have to check four sources for everything. Why not have a book where someone has done all that for you?
MIGNON: Yeah.
JUNE: Because even if you've chosen a style, there could be two sources of answers. But what I most wanted to do with that book was, whenever you pick up a book about grammar or punctuation especially, or style, even the Modern Language Association style book, even something like Roy Peter Clark's wonderful style book, what you have is people making decisions. “It's okay, I'm going to make this call. We're going to use the serial comma.” There's enough good advice out there based on experts' opinions. No one needed any more opinion from me. What I wanted to do was keep me out of it and present them with the options, as officially offered to them by the official sources. I didn't want to say “yay” or “nay” to serial commas. I wanted to say, “You can choose X or Y. What I think is irrelevant. I'm not going to try to force it on you.”
MIGNON: Yeah. And I understand that you are in the process of updating the book, which again sounds like a lot of work. How much has changed?
JUNE: A lot. For one thing, both the Associated Press Stylebook and the Chicago Manual of Style now use the same dictionary. So a lot of the places where they diverged, and I had to mention the differences in the book, they're now going to be the same, and I have to check every single one. As there's an A-to-Z section in the back that literally lists, alphabetically, terms of interest to anyone looking to punctuate correctly. For example, “makeup" or "pickup?” or there's some obscenities in there. And “are there periods in USA?” All that kind of stuff. And it goes on for a long time, and almost all of those are going to have to be rechecked.
MIGNON: Yeah. And then I think you talked about how there's book style, newspaper style, academic style, and business style. And I was just curious: “What style?” and then “House style?” right? Authors can have their own style sheet. What did you use, book style for this, or did you have—because you're a journalist, you've been a journalist.
So which style did you use?
JUNE: I am thrilled to report that it was not my decision; that 10 Speed Press, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House, they have their style, which is the Chicago Manual of Style and possibly some of their own house issues—I don't know. So I got to stay completely out of it. I had enough on my hands with figuring out how MLA and APA handled those things.
So it is edited in Chicago style.
MIGNON: Yeah. And then just because I know how hard it was to copyedit my books when you write a book that is about writing, that’s about punctuation, about grammar—copyediting becomes exponentially more difficult than I think any other book. Have you affirmed to me that this is really hard to copyedit this kind of…
JUNE: It's not you, it's the task. It's the task. It's confusing. It's confusing.
MIGNON: Yeah, there's just so many things to check. I love my copy editor who worked on my book; she was really good, and yeah, it matters for a book like this. And still, of course, still people need to know they're not perfect. There are always typos or things we missed in books like this, and we do our best to fix them in the next revision or catch them, but...
JUNE: Yes. Anyone who feels bad about their own skills or bad about making mistakes would be absolutely thrilled to know just how many things my copy editor had to fix in my books because I either flaked or didn't really get it. So you keep learning as you go. It's a painful, it's a humbling subject area to claim to have some knowledge in.
MIGNON: I know you said you don't want to insert your opinion in this particular book. You have other books where you do have opinions. Is there a grammar rule you hate and grudgingly follow, or hate and just don't follow, even though maybe you feel like you should?
JUNE: Yes, there has to be some. I just had one; let's check my time. Yes, I dislike semicolons a lot. I've written about this a lot. I have reasons for disliking semicolons. I will go to pretty great lengths to revise a sentence so that it doesn't need semicolons in the first place. So, not a semicolon fan.
MIGNON: But why? What are your reasons?
JUNE: Here's my main reason. When you start off as a reporter, there's this very clear focus, at least in my little corner of the community journalism world. I was a reporter at the same newspaper where the column started out as well. You learn very quickly that your job is very much to serve the reader. Your job, I had one editor who said, “This is a 10-dollar word; we don't use 10-dollar words; we use nickels and dimes here.” Because you're not showing off your writing skill. You're not showing off your literary abilities. You're trying to make things as palatable, accurate, and digestible as possible for the reader. So I think that semicolons get in the way of that. And a lot of the writers I edit use semicolons more to show off that they know how than to actually help the sentence be more digestible, which kind of goes against my early journalism training. So it's not about you, writer; it's about the reader. No showboating in my pages.
I will go to great lengths. Other times, in some cases, you cannot avoid using a semicolon because you just have structures that just need a greater degree of separation than a comma would provide. And in those cases, they're absolutely lifesavers, but when it comes to just showing the two clauses are closely connected, yeah, two independent clauses are similar in ideas.
Why don't you just use a period? It's more digestible. I love short sentences too. So why are you showing off you know how to use a semicolon? I would have assumed you know how to use a semicolon. It's a very controversial opinion.
MIGNON: And do you have a favorite rule? Something that you enjoy fixing when it comes across your editing desk or that you enjoy explaining to people?
JUNE: Yes, I do. Yes, I do.
For some reason, everyone in the world thinks that when you mention the name of an organization that is sometimes referred to by its initials, it is absolutely imperative that you immediately stick its initials in there in parentheses. Obsessive, knee-jerk, completely unnecessary.
Sometimes it's like a legend for, “Here's how you will be able to understand the rest of this written piece,” which is rude. You're supposed to speak the reader's language, not give them a legend for how to speak yours. Other times it never even comes up again. So it'll be the Association of June and Mignon Talking, AJP, and that'll never see, there'll never be another reference to the whole thing.
And it's like, why did you feel the obsessive need to do that? And I take them all out. The Associated Press style is very clear that those come out. The Chicago Manual of Style doesn't really take the same position because they're dealing with book-length projects where sometimes you really need to give readers sort of a guide to understanding what will come 30, 40, 50 pages later. But in a news-length article, it's unnecessary.
JUNE: Associated Press style strongly discourages that habit of putting initials for an organization name in parentheses directly after the name. It prefers to use words the length the reader already knows. For example, "the group," "the association," "the homeowner's group," that kind of thing. It will also allow you to, so if you say this organization's name, the June and Mignon Love Grammar group, and it really is common to refer to that with whatever the initials are for that group I just made up. You can do that in the next sentence or two without ever having inserted it in parentheses. That's an option.
MIGNON: J.A.M.L.G.
JUNE: You were listening.
MIGNON: I was taking notes.
JUNE: You can reference the J.A.M.L.G. two sentences later without ever having put it in parentheses, so that whole, “Stop. I just mentioned a group.”
You need to take note of the fact that it has initials. Here are the initials. They may or may not come up in the rest of the article. It's completely unnecessary, but ideally you always use language the reader already knows whenever possible.
MIGNON: Yeah, that's great. I would not have thought of that. It reminds me of another rule with parentheses where it's often you'll see people write the number three, and then they'll put the numeral in parentheses after it. And I get the sense that people just think, like, I should do that, but it turns out it's only really required for contracts, because long ago, it's a way of preventing fraud, making it harder to do fraud. So instead of having to change one word, you would have to change the whole set of number and word. So it's really just a contract thing.
You don't need to do it in any other instance.
JUNE: Yeah, I've noticed it in legal writing. When I see it anywhere else, I have the same reaction you have, which is "no."
MIGNON: I just realized I have one of your other books here right behind me. I also have "It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences." This is a very different book from the punctuation book and from your other one. This is more, I don't know, holistic.
Do you want to talk about how this book…
JUNE: This book is, of the five books I've written, that one's sort of my passion. I'm fascinated with what makes a sentence effective, and especially what makes it stink. I've spent a lot of time editing sub-professional writing, let's call it, and really fascinated by what's going on in this sentence that isn't working.
"Is the antecedent to the pronoun you're using unclear? Is the noun phrase fuzzy? Are you using passive voice?" That kind of thing. I'm really fascinated with what makes sentences work, and that is my years-long obsession with taking them apart and looking at the nuts and bolts and trying to make it helpful and useful to anyone whose writing is coming off , and they don't understand why.
MIGNON: Yeah. Wonderful. June Casagrande, author of many books, including "The Best Punctuation Book, Period," which, by the way, I think is one of the best all-time book titles. It's a great title. It's so clever.
JUNE: Confession. Confession. I pitched it as "The Best Punctuation Book Ever," and the editor said, "How about 'period'?" And I was like, "Duh, of course."
MIGNON: It's brilliant. It's brilliant.
JUNE: Credit to her.
MIGNON: For the regular listeners, this is the end of our show. If you're a subscriber to Grammarpalooza, if you support this show, which we appreciate so much, you're going to get a bonus segment in your feed. If you want to sign up, you can go to quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus to learn more about it.
And I'm going to talk to June. We're going to get her book recommendations, which we always do. And I also want to talk to her about AI editing because I know she's been editing a lot of AI writing these days, and I want to hear more about that. But for the rest of you, thank you for being here.
June, thank you for being here. Where can people find you?
JUNE: I have a podcast and blog at grammarunderground.com.
MIGNON: Wonderful. Check out June at grammarunderground.com. Thanks again so much for being here.
JUNE: Thanks for having me, Mignon.