Why punctuation matters when it comes to writing a poem - Ian McMillan

I read somewhere that the great novelist Graham Greene could spend all morning deciding whether to put a comma in a sentence and, once he’d inserted it, spend all afternoon deciding whether to take it out or not.

You’re my man, Graham Greene. Or: you’re my man, Graham Greene!

Full stops aren’t my favourite piece of punctuation but they certainly do their job well. They’re like somebody closing a door at the end of a sentence. Mind you, they may be useful but they’re not subtle.

They certainly do finish a sentence off without a cliffhanger or without any possibility of the door swinging open again. Once that door is shut, it’s shut. Locked. You just have to start again, in a different room.

Commas have, I reckon, more nuance. They can break up a sentence and, in my opinion, make it dance, make it more poetic, more euphonious. A comma is like a breath taken, a pause in a sentence that makes you think.

Sometimes, it has to be said, people can overuse commas, sprinkling them all over their prose like some kind of grammatical condiment so that the sentence becomes too rich, too hard to digest. There’s also that phenomenon known as The Oxford Comma which, to put it mildly, is just one too many commas in a sentence.

An example would be ‘Ian McMillan is a poet, journalist, and playwright’ and that penultimate comma just seems to feel wrong and that must be why it’s wrong, which is as good a reason as any for not using it. I try to avoid Oxford Commas at all costs because they’re clumsy, unnecessary, and daft.

Exclamation marks are like hot sauce! They should be used infrequently! Let’s face it, they’re exhausting because it feels like you’re shouting all the time! They do get a bit addictive, though, I have to say! And I use them when I’m tweeting (I mean X-ing) all the time!

And what about the question mark? Eh? What about the question mark? Well, I must admit to a sneaking admiration for the question mark because it does what it says on the tin and it marks out a sentence as a question, and it makes us think. So ‘Barnsley will win today.’ is a statement of fact but ‘Barnsley will win today?’ as well as mimicking in print the upspeak that a lot of young people employ when they’re conversing, genuinely puts a bit of doubt in the mind of the person who reads it. Maybe they won’t win? Oh yes they will!

The colon: now that punctuation mark tells you what’s coming. I said: it tells you what’s coming. I’ll tell you what it like: aggressive. And I’ll tell you why I don’t use it very often: that’s why.

Perhaps because I write poems and I like ambiguity my two favourite pieces of punctuation are…the ellipsis and the semi-colon; they’re they creative members of the punctuation family, I reckon; they’re the ones who help us to dream…

Semi colons hold a sentence up for examination; we can watch it twirl in the light; we can begin to understand more. Ellipses add a bit of anticipatory magic to any piece of writing, even if it’s just a shopping list: (there’s me using a colon, by the way) Eggs, Bread, Bananas…tomatoes.

Oh yes! I love punctuation!