Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark Read Free Book Online

a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more.
    Parentheses introduce a play within a play. Like a detour sign in the middle of a street, they require the driver to maneuver around to regain the original direction. Parenthetical expressions are best kept short and (Pray for us, Saint Nora of Ephron) witty.
    My great friend Don Fry has undertaken a quixotic quest to eliminate that tree branch in the road — the dash. "Avoid the dash," he insists as often as William Strunk begged his students to "omit needless words." Don's crusade was inspired by his observation — with which I agree — that the dash has become the default mark for writers who never mastered the formal rules. But the dash has two brilliant uses: a pair of dashes can set off an idea contained within a sentence, and a dash near the end can deliver a punch line.
    In his book Propaganda, Edward Bernays uses both kinds of dashes to describe the purposes of political persuasion:
    Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world. Even if this be unduly pessimistic — and that remains to be proved — the opinion reflects a tendency that is undoubtedly real.
    We are proud of our diminishing infant death rate — and that too is the work of propaganda.
    That leaves the colon, and here's what it does: it announces a word, phrase, or clause the way a trumpet flourish in a Shakespeare play sounds the arrival of the royal procession. More from Vonnegut:
    I am often asked to give advice to young writers who wish to be famous and fabulously well-to-do. This is the best I have to offer:
    While looking as much like a bloodhound as possible, announce that you are working twelve hours a day on a masterpiece. Warning: All is lost if you crack a smile, (from Palm Sunday)
    Writers store other punctuation arrows in their quiver, including ellipses, brackets, exclamation points, and capital letters. These have formal uses, of course, but in the hands of an inventive writer they can express all the organ stops of voice, pitch, and tone. Here, for example, James McBride describes the power of a preacher in The Color of Water:
    "We . .. [silence] ... know... today... arrhh ... um ... I said WEEEE ... know... THAT [silence] ahhh ... JESUS [church: "Amen!"] ... ahhh, CAME DOWN ... ["Yes! Amen!"] I said CAME DOWWWWNNNN! ["Go on!"] He CAME-ON-DOWN-AND — LED-THE — PEOPLE-OF — JERU-SALEM-AMEN!"
    When it comes to punctuation, all writers develop habits that buttress their styles. Mine include wearing out the comma and using more periods than average. I abhor unsightly blemishes, so I shun semicolons and parentheses. I overuse the colon. I write an exclamation with enough force to avoid the weedy appendage of an exclamation point. I prefer the comma to the dash but sometimes use one — if only to pluck Don Fry's beard.
    WORKSHOP
    1. Make sure you have a good basic reference to guide you through the rules of punctuation. I favor A Writer's Reference by Diana Hacker. For fun, read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a humorous if crusty attack by Lynne Truss against faulty punctuation, especially in public texts.
    2. Take one of your old pieces and repunctuate it. Add some optional commas, or take some out. Read both versions aloud. Hear a difference?
    3. Make conscious decisions on how fast you'd like the reader to move. Perhaps you want readers to zoom across the landscape. Or to tiptoe through a technical explanation. Punctuate accordingly.
    4. Reread this section and analyze my use of punctuation. Challenge my choices. Repunctuate it.
    5. When you gain confidence, have some fun and use the punctuation marks described above as well as ellipses, brackets, and capital letters. Take inspiration from the passage by James McBride.
    When writers fall in love with their words, it is a good feeling that can lead to a bad effect. When we fall in love with all our quotes, characters, anecdotes, and metaphors, we cannot bear to kill any of them. But