Using Creative Punctuation to Elevate Your Writing

Punctuation. Every story needs it—full stop.

It’s a basic rule that writing requires punctuation, but how writers use it can be anything but basic. When you dive deeper into all those little marks, you’ll discover a whole world of ways in which you can use these technical signs and symbols to get really creative.

Punctuation marks aren’t just about correct grammar: they’re tools to create intrigue, shock the reader, flip a view on a character, or incite a sigh to end all sighs.

In this article, award-winning author and writing coach Evie Wyld is here to guide you through the myriad of ways you can elevate your whole story world using these little technical marks, and why you might like to do so. Plus, she’ll share examples of how you can make a little bit of extra magic happen with the tap of a key. Over to Evie...

Reading is a rhythmic act, which means writing is too. From syllable to word to complete sentence, from paragraph to page. The eye runs along these marks, pausing for different lengths depending on a very specific type of mark. Those punctuation marks transform the meaning around them. And yet, to many writers, they can often feel peripheral, extrinsic, or even run counter to the creative process.

In this blog, I want to celebrate punctuation and its usage as part of the creative act. And I speak as someone who, for most of my life, would randomly chuck a semi-colon into my writing, hoping it would finally be right and I’d look like the sort of person who knew how to correctly use a semi-colon.

We need to admit up front that punctuation, sitting alongside grammar as part of writing mechanics, is intimately tied to notions of intelligence and education (which can sometimes be linked, but which are not the same thing).

As Lynne Truss says in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, everyone thinks they are the exact right amount of linguistic pedant. Anyone who is more precise is a soulless snob, anyone less an illiterate fool (my simplification, she’s much more polite).

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Using the basics for truly creative writing

The fact is that education on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1960s onward placed less emphasis on the technical aspects of language and more on meaning and expression. The pendulum then swung back in the other direction in the 80s and 90s, and is now pretty far over into formal writing, as anyone who has tried to help their child with their homework on ‘fronted adverbials’ can testify.

For a big chunk of us who are in our thirties and beyond, we just weren’t formally taught this stuff in the way previous generations were, or subsequent generations have been since. But that does not stop us feeling a bit stupid for not knowing about it. And when you don’t feel confident using something, you are far less inclined to play with it.

So, let’s take a run through the basic punctuation marks. We’ll look at the general rules and their intended meanings while also considering how you can use them to particular effect in your creative writing.

The full stop. Period.

Let’s begin with the full stop, or period. It goes at the end and it makes the reader stop.

Kids get taught that they are the red light on a traffic light of punctuation. But I often think about them as a useful marker to take a full breath. This is partly because an important stage for me when I’m writing a draft is to read my work out loud. But even if you’re reading in your head, a correctly deployed full stop is a welcome moment to bring a thought to a close and pause for a long beat before venturing onward.

The creative usage of a full stop tends to relate to how long you leave it before you offer that moment of pause. At one end of the spectrum is the novel Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, which is comprised of a single one-thousand-page sentence—a deliberate choice to immerse us in the consciousness of Ellmann’s protagonist.

It’s also all about immersion in James Joyce’s 4,391-word sentence, which makes up the final paragraph of Ulysses, or the famous 1,288-word sentence in William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!.

But even if you’re not writing monster sentences, where you place your full stops can have an enormous impact on the feeling of your writing at paragraph level. As an example, let’s look at one of the most famous opening sentences in English—the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. 

Let’s start with how it appears.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Now let’s turn our full stops up to eleven and see how it changes:

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom. It was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief. It was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of Light. It was the season of Darkness. It was the spring of hope. It was the winter of despair. We had everything before us. We had nothing before us. We were all going direct to Heaven. We were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Though technically correct, it feels totally different. Those full stops are like a car stalling constantly.

Which isn’t to say that, sometimes, that stalling motion can’t be exactly what you want. What better way could there be to render that panting short-of-breath and rush of sensation as a character faces their own death than this use of short then long sentences from Ernest Hemingway’s short story, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’:

All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went on too long, and wore him out, but here he had something that had hurt frightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him, the pain had stopped.
—Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ 

The semicolon

One notch down from the full stop is the semicolon, which is probably the most commonly misused punctuation mark there is. There’s a really simple rule: the two independent clauses on either side of the semicolon have to be able to function on their own as a standalone sentence. The semicolon simply puts those two independent clauses next to each other and suggests a relationship. Like an awkward person at a party.  

The most common misuse is when people just use it as a comma:

• ‍I love to watch films; especially horror films.

The next most common is using it instead of a colon:

• ‍I have three favorite horror films; Jaws, Rosemary’s Baby, and Hereditary.

But semicolons can trip you up, even when they’re grammatically correct, as in the opening to 1984  by George Orwell, for example:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours.
—George Orwell, 1984

Let’s see what happens when we add in a sprinkling of semicolons:

It was a bright cold day in April; the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats; at one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs; it was no use trying the lift; even at the best of times it was seldom working; at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours.

It loses so much of its crispness. Ideas and impressions start to blur into each other. You can see how rhythmically different a semicolon is to a full stop in the experience of reading.

There’s an additional aspect to lots of clauses joined by semicolons, which is that it will make your prose feel like those enormous novels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Of course, if that’s exactly the effect you’re going for—fill your boots.

The comma

Reminding us again of the oral roots of storytelling, the comma originates from the ancient Greek Komma, which was essentially a signal to take a breath.

The comma has a variety of functions. Let’s whizz through them:

1. Separating things in a list:
   Like this, this, this, and that. (I’m not going to get into the Oxford Comma debate. Friendships have been torn apart by it.)
2. Separating elements of a date of birth or address:
   I was born on July 20, 1985.
   The letter was sent to 123 Punctuation Street, London, SE12 4BT.
3. When someone is being directly addressed:
   ‘John, listen to me when I’m explaining semi-colons to you.’
   ‘I’m afraid that’s not the right kind of comma splice, Mildred.’
4. After some introductory element:
   Exhausted but defiant, we watched the fifth wave of zombies crest the hill.
5. To keep grammatically non-essential information in a little pouch:
   Edward’s sister, red-haired, listless, and bored, looked suspiciously at the waitress as she arrived with the plates.
6. To separate two independent clauses:
   She decided to leave early, for she still had a whole blog about punctuation to write before bed. 
   The dog barked all night, so the neighbors complained.

Now this is an interesting one: something called comma splicing, which is technically an error and which some people get very hot under the collar about.

Sometimes it is just plain wrong, as in ‘I love to read, I can’t put down a good book.’

Other times, although technically incorrect, it feels much more of a gray area.

‘The sun was shining, the birds were singing’ should really be ‘The sun was shining, and the birds were singing.’ But you see that rule broken in most creative writing once per page, and I certainly do it all the time.

The colon

This mark signals that what comes to the right of it is either a quote, a list, or an elaboration of what’s on the left of it.

• ‍The blog writer couldn’t have been clearer: ‘I am a comma-splicer and therefore not to be listened to.’
• She had collected everything she needed to finish her novel: a blog about punctuation, a typewriter, and a big stack of blank paper.
• She had only one goal: to finally finish reading this blog about punctuation.

A reminder here that with a semicolon, the clauses are independent but joined, whereas with a colon, there’s a very clear rule that left introduces right. 

Apostrophes

To show possession:

• ‍Hey, have you read Evie’s blog about punctuation?

Or to show a missing letter in a contraction:

• ‍I won’t be reading that blog about punctuation and I shouldn’t have thought you’d want to either.

The question mark

 I feel like we all probably have a pretty good handle on this one? Right?

The exclamation mark (or exclamation point)

Though you can technically use them outside of dialogue to end an exclamatory sentence, I’m struggling to think of a single time it has ever felt necessary to me. If you have to add this emphasis to what you’re writing, I would suggest you rewrite it so it’s clear without the exclamation point.

(Fun fact: Westward Ho! is a real place in Devon, England and is the only placename in Britain to use an exclamation mark.)

Parentheses (or brackets)

You can use these to enclose extra non-essential information. But beware, a little goes a long way. They can feel like a great shortcut to a kind of chatty, digressive, stream-of-consciousness voice, but can run the risk of grating.

• ‍So there we were at the mall (I know—dull, right, but a boy’s gotta shop). I saw Jason (looking, as ever, fiiiiiine). I called out to him (what are you doing, you idiot!).

Speech marks

(You may prefer the term ‘quotation marks.’) Double or single, depending on your publisher’s style guide and geographical location (though some European countries use combinations of the em dash and what’s known as the guillemet, or «chevron»). But again, I feel like we’ve got these. One set at the beginning of dialogue and one set at the end.

What about the em dash? And the en dash?

You will notice that I have left out a whole family of punctuation: hyphens, and em and en dashes. 

This is partly due to these things sometimes being the fiercest battleground in the use of punctuation between those of us on either side of the Atlantic. (Just like the Oxford comma.) But if it’s your favorite punctuation mark and you’d love to know more, let us know and I’ll venture into it.

Final thoughts

Having just written too many words about it, I want to say one final thing. Don’t worry too much about punctuation.

Yes, you should try your hardest to be in control of it. It’s one of the tools you can use to produce literary effect, so it would be a shame not to. And a bit like not polishing your shoes for an interview, it might signal to a reader (or agent or editor) a lack of care. 

But ultimately, there are professionals whose entire job it is to fix this stuff.

I would choose a manuscript with heart and voice and energy with the odd bit of eccentric punctuation every time over one made up of endless rows of perfectly pinned dead butterflies.

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