Getting to grips with grammar and how it guides the ways we communicate - Ian McMillan

Think of all the things punctuation can do. A full stop puts the brakes on. Just like that one just did. A series of. Full stops. Can give a sentence. A kind of. Menacing quality. Commas can give rhythm and nuance to a sentence, like this: The sleet swirled, twirled and whirled, giving the whole street, or at least the bits of it you could still see, the air of a shaken snow globe.

Question marks hang around at the end of the line like aggressive coat-hangers, making sure you’re asking for the information that you need, and exclamation marks are like little balloons popping and exploding many of the possibilities of the end of a particular sentence.

I’m a big fan of all punctuation marks, but the two I like best are the semicolon and the ellipsis. The semicolon is, in my humble opinion, the undisputed queen of punctuation; the ellipsis, on the other hand, is an international mark of mystery…

I’ve been told off by editors and proof-readers in the past for overusing the semicolon; they say that I should just end the sentence with a full stop; then I can start a new thought. I disagree with this; for me the semicolon gives a sentence subtlety and the rhythms of speech. Semicolons help authors to write authentic dialogue, I believe; as does the odd colon: well, it’s a way to march through a paragraph, isn’t it?

The ellipsis, though… the ellipsis. Those three footballs rolling through a sentence like a cliff-hanger in a novel. What on earth is going to happen next…? The ellipsis will tell you…

The thing about ellipses is that you can’t use them too often because, like anchovies, they get a bit strong… they take over the entire sentence, reducing it to… or…

The most authentic Yorkshire punctuation I can come up with is a double-size full stop for the decisive way elderly Yorkshire

men end their sentences.

“And I’ll tell thi that for nowt.” Somehow it seems to me that you need a giant full stop to emphasise that ending; maybe a full stop the size of a football, crowding out everything else on the page. That would do it.

Or would it…