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When direct questions take on the tone of a command, the use of a question mark becomes more discretionary. “Will everyone please assemble in my office at four o’clock?” is strictly correct, but not all authorities insist on the question mark there.

A less frequent problem arises when a direct question appears outside a direct quotation. Fieldhouse, in Everyman’s Good English Guide, suggests that the following punctuation is correct: “Why does this happen to us, we wonder?” The Fowler brothers, however, call this an amusing blunder; certainly it is extremely irregular. The more usual course is to attach the question mark directly to the question. Thus: “Why does this happen to us? we wonder.” But such constructions are clumsy and are almost always improved by being turned into indirect questions: “We wonder why this happens to us.”

quotation marks (inverted commas). An issue that arises frequently in Britain but almost never in America is whether to put periods and other punctuation inside or outside quotation marks when they appear together. The practice that prevails in America and is increasingly common in Britain is to put the punctuation inside the quotes. Thus, “He said, ‘I will not go.’ ” But some publishers prefer the punctuation to fall outside except when it is part of the quotation. Thus the example above would be “He said, ‘I will not go’.”

When quotation marks are used to set off a complete statement, the first word of the quotation should be capitalized (“He said, ‘Victory is ours’ ”) except when the quotation is preceded by that (“He said that ‘victory is ours’ ”). Fowler believed that no punctuation was necessary to set off attributive quotations; he would, for instance, delete the commas from the following: “Tomorrow,” he said, “is a new day.” His argument was that commas are not needed to mark the interruption or introduction of a quotation because the quotation marks already do that. Logically he is correct. But with equal logic we could argue that question marks should be dispensed with on the grounds that the context almost always makes it clear that a question is being asked. The commas are required not by logic but by convention.

semicolon. The semicolon is heavier than the comma but lighter than the period. Its principal function is to divide contact clauses—that is, two ideas that are linked by sense but that lack a conjunction. For instance, “You take the high road; I’ll take the low road.” Equally that could be made into two complete sentences or, by introducing a conjunction, into one (“You take the high road and I’ll take the low road”). The semicolon is also sometimes used to separate long coordinate clauses. In this role it was formerly used much more extensively than it is today.

bibliography

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suggested

reading

Throughout the text I have in general referred to the following books by the surname of the author, ignoring the contributions of those who revised the originals. Thus although Sir Ernest Gowers substantially revised A Dictionary of Modern English Usage in 1965, that book is referred to throughout the text as “Fowler.” References to “Gowers” are meant to suggest Gowers’s own book, The Complete Plain Words.

Aitchison, Jean, Language Change: Progress or Decay?, Fontana, London, 1981.

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2000.

Austin, Tim (compiler), The Times Guide to English Style and Usage, Times Books, London, 1999.

Bernstein, Theodore M., The Careful Writer and Dos, Don’ts and Maybes of English Usage, Free Press, New York, 1995.

Burchfield, R. W. (ed.), The New Fowler’s Modern Usage (third edition), Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996.

Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995.

Encarta World English Dictionary, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1999.

Evans, Bergen and Cornelia, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, Random House, New York, 1957.

Fieldhouse, Harry, Everyman’s Good English