Punctuation, Punctuation...

I don’t particularly enjoy correcting people’s punctuation and formatting when editing limericks at the OEDILF; I enjoy reading entertaining limericks where none of that gets in the way, so that I can approve them with confidence. But for the OEDILF to reach an ideal state where all our writers pay attention to punctuation and formatting issues before they submit their work, our standards have to be clear.

There are certainly approved limericks that play with form, but the general rule of the OEDILF is that we punctuate our limericks as if they were written out as prose, which avoids endless discussions about whether a comma or its omission is poetically justified. It makes it easier to tell what authors mean, and meaning, after all, is central to our enterprise—as central as writing entertaining poetry. Even in the rules of prose punctuation there’s enough variability to keep us more than busy.

Ellipses

Ellipses are the three dots that indicate a pause or omission... each single dot of which is an ellipsis. The word ellipsis also means the act of omission itself in a piece of writing.

Early on, some argued that the OEDILF should follow academic usage when it comes to ellipses, using four points at the end of a sentence to indicate omitted words, with the fourth point serving as a period or full stop. However, almost none of our limericks use ellipses in this way; we use them in their alternate, non-academic sense:

The ellipsis can also be used to indicate a pause in the flow of a sentence and is especially useful in quoted speech: Juan thought and thought ... and then thought some more. “I’m wondering ...” Juan said, bemused.

Many limericks contain or consist of quoted speech, so this style is perfectly appropriate. A trailing ellipsis used this way doesn’t need the extra point to show that it comes after the end of a sentence, because the sentence doesn’t end. The trailing-off character of the ellipses suggests that the author had more to say, but fate or better judgment intervened. Even if we’re looking at what seems to be a complete sentence, we don’t know if it was actually complete or just the first clause before a colon, semicolon or comma.

This is why every published novel that I’ve checked has three ellipses to indicate a pause or trailing off of thought—no fourth point to indicate a full stop.

As for spacing around such ellipses, there are a few possible approaches. In works of fiction you’ll see ellipses used like this:

If Wendy Wagner got a bit closer and really got to know him . . . Well, that would be a different story.

‘Except there’s been a slight change . . .’

What looks good on the page, though, doesn’t always look good on the screen, which is why computer-generated ellipses tend to be tight: ...

For the time being, our work exists on the screen, so it makes sense to use tight ellipses. When using them in the middle of a sentence, I put a space after them, because otherwise the pause appears to attach to the word after it. I don’t tend to put a space before them... That way the pause attaches to that thought rather than floating off into space, and doesn’t get mistaken for an academic ellipsis indicating omitted words. In both cases, though, there’s room for personal preference.

We do see some academic ellipses in our Author’s Notes (rather than the limericks themselves), where authors sometimes quote extracts from articles or books with words omitted; in such cases academic style obviously applies.

Some of the above contradicts the OEDILF Standards and Guidelines (which reflect the academic model), but all I can say is I’m glad that we don’t have to workshop any of the novels sitting on my shelves...

Em-dashes

Some new OEDILFers get the impression that the long dashes known as em-dashes have to have spaces on either side in OEDILF style, or that they have to have no spaces on either side. Actually, our house style is that spaces around em-dashes are a matter of author preference, as long as they match on both sides. So—this. Also — this. But not— this. Or —this. The only requirement is to be consistent throughout a particular limerick and Author’s Note. Note also that we don’t use the “space en-dash space” style of some U.K. publishing houses—en-dashes are used in the OEDILF for number and date ranges only.

Abbrev.

British usage is to omit the full stop when the last letter of an abbreviation is the last letter of the word. So, Mr, Dr, St, but Rev. and Capt. In American usage, an abbreviation always ends with a period: Mr., St., and Capt. The OEDILF accepts either approach, as long as you’re consistent within a particular piece.

Quotations

The use of other punctuation in relation to quotation marks is one of the minefields of OEDILF workshopping, especially as it’s subject to regional variation. American style is to put commas and periods inside the end quotes for quoted speech and quoted fragments. U.K. style is to have commas and full stops outside end quotes if the quotes contain a fragment, but inside them if the quotes contain a complete lexical unit of quoted speech, or the first part of one that continues after “he said” or similar:

“Hello,” I said, “here’s a good example.”

Quoting just a “word”, say, follows different rules in the U.K.: the comma isn’t considered part of what’s quoted, so it goes outside the quotes.

So in both the U.K. and the US, for quoted speech, a comma goes after the “say” or “said” (or equivalent) that introduces the quote, and if the quoted speech doesn’t end the sentence as a whole, and doesn’t end with an exclamation mark or question mark, a comma goes before the end quote. Where it doesn’t normally go in the case of quoted speech is outside the end quote: I once surveyed dozens of U.K.-published books and newspapers to check how uniform this was in U.K. style, and none of them put the commas outside the quotes for complete units of speech. That doesn’t mean that exceptions don’t exist, but they are rare. If you do it, you should know that it will look wrong to anyone who takes their lead from books or newspapers in the U.S. or the U.K.

We don’t automatically include a comma at the end of every “word,” we care to “place”, in quotation marks—only at the end of quotations (including quoted speech) where the sentence continues beyond them (and even then, there are cases when we can choose to omit the comma altogether). If the sentence doesn’t continue beyond them, then the end punctuation of the quotation goes inside the quotes, as it’s considered part of the quotation. But even then, we can imagine cases where the end punctuation should be considered part of the larger sentence and not the quotation itself:

Why did Johnny say, “I am an unremarkable example”?

Careful, though; U.S. style would put the end punctuation inside the quotes even here, whatever the logic of the larger sentence:

My friend told me she hated uptalking Australian accents, so why, when I asked her why, did she reply, “No further questions?”

End commas are also considered to be “part of the quotation” when it comes to speech, standing in for the full stop that would otherwise be there if it wasn’t part of a larger sentence. Here are some random examples from various U.K. publishers:

‘Don’t take it the wrong way,’ I said. ‘It was only a joke.’ (Penguin, 1996.)

‘You’ve been looking too closely at pictures,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you swap them for some long horizons?’ (Picador, 1989.)

‘Well then,’ I say in as calm a voice as I can manage, ‘I must insist that you do.’ (Phoenix, 2001.)

If quoted dialogue ends a sentence then the punctuation inside the quotation marks is considered to close the sentence as well as the quotation. If you’re quoting a complete sentence of speech, then the full stop in British usage goes inside the end quote, and a comma leads into the whole:

He said, “This is the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

But “not this”.

Short complete thoughts like “yes” can go in various directions:

So I asked Molly Bloom (she said, “Yes”).
So I asked Molly Bloom (she said “yes”).
So I asked Molly Bloom (she said yes).
So I asked Molly Bloom. (She said, “Yes.”)
So I asked Molly Bloom. (She said “yes”.)
So I asked Molly Bloom. (She said yes.)

But not

So I asked Molly Bloom (she said, “Yes.”)

because the need for the full stop to end the greater sentence is greater than for it ending the part inside the parentheses (which you should be able to remove with what remains still making sense).

Here’s an example plucked at random from The Times (bolding mine):

Dr Rowan Williams, who is backed by other senior church leaders, said that the Government must not become a “licensing authority” that decides which religious symbols are acceptable.

“The ideal of a society where no visible public signs of religion would be seen — no crosses round necks, no sidelocks, turbans or veils — is a politically dangerous one,” he writes. “It assumes that what comes first in society is the central political ‘licensing authority’, which has all the resource it needs to create a workable public morality.”

It’s not just The Times—The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Scotsman (and Penguin Books, HarperCollins, Pan, Arrow, Faber & Faber, Abacus, Black Swan, Vintage, Picador, Phoenix, Ebury and Sceptre) all put the comma inside the right-hand quote in these quoted-sentence situations.

You’ll notice that some of the U.K. examples above use single quotes rather than the double quotes used in the U.S. Single quotes are acceptable in the OEDILF, but few of our limericks use them. Given that it’s also acceptable to use double quotes in the U.K. (newspapers and magazines often do), and only acceptable to use doubles in the U.S., we converged on doubles early on. So it depends whether you want your limericks to look a bit weird in an OEDILF context, or perfectly fine in a U.K. context.

What isn’t fine is using a mixture of singles and doubles for different types of quotations, such as quoted sentences versus quoted fragments. A double/single mix can feel logical, I know, because I used to do it myself. But I suspect it’s a result of being raised in an environment where some publications use all singles and others use all doubles and combining them in one’s own head, because it doesn’t actually have any support that I can find in U.K. usage guides or looking through novels and newspapers for examples... they’re either all of one or all of the other (apart from quotations within quotations).

And Commas

A comma precedes and when it joins independent clauses, i.e. ones that could stand alone as sentences:

[You lift up your bat], and [you take off your hat].

but not when they share a subject:

You [lift up your bat] and [take off your hat].

A string of ands can end up feeling like a kid’s Christmas list, and this approach prevents worse: I wanna pony and a doll and a dress and a bike and a big monster is going to eat you if you don’t give ’em to me.

One more. An appositive is a word or group of words that defines or further identifies the noun or noun phrase preceding it. An appositive can be offset with commas or dashes or parentheses, but it doesn’t always have to be. When a word or word group in apposition is essential to the meaning of the noun it belongs to, don’t put commas, dashes or parentheses around it (“my friend speedysnail told me not to”). When the noun preceding the appositive identifies the subject sufficiently on its own, do (“speedysnail, illustrious OEDILF editor, told me to use them”).

Reworked from forum and workshopping comments from November 2004–April 2023.