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However, on the subject of quotation marks in particular, I’m not sold. I adored McCarthy’s The Road, found it hauntingly beautiful and about as close to poetry as prose gets.
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This article has given me much to think about. I use punctuation where punctuation is grammatically necessary or stylistically or contextually useful, and, as a writer, I will not go out of my way to dash out a comma, a pair of quotation marks or even a semicolon. A straight line from A to B is quicker and easier to follow than a convoluted chain of twists and turns.īottom line: punctuation should neither be wanting nor in abundance, unless one is shooting for a particular style. However, this brings us to the golden rule in writing: the more straight-forward one writes, the better the style. Of course, one can argue that the less punctuation one uses, the more skill one has a writer in order to pull this stunt off.
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Quite the opposite, in fact: punctuation serves as a clarifier and a speech-guide. Punctuation was not a whimsical invention conceived by our long-winded progenitors in order to hamper literature. An excess of beams, if artistically fashioned, can be passed off as pillars, which are essentially superfluous but help the onlooker to recognize that, yes, this is indeed a house. Punctuation is like the beams in a house: the beams are there to support the structure of the house, to prevent it from falling into disarray and to give an added level in the house. Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC.
#MINIMALIST STYLE SET IN WORD 2013 HOW TO#
Seven Tips From William Faulkner on How to Write Fictionĭavid Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in English Werner Herzog Reads From Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses But lovers of his work may find renewed appreciation for his streamlined syntax. For those who find McCarthy sometimes maddeningly opaque, this statement of intent may not help clarify things much. McCarthy, enamored of the prose style of the Neoclassical English writers but annoyed by their over-reliance on semicolons, remembers paring down an essay “by Swift or something” and hearing his professor say, “this is very good, this is exactly what’s needed.” Encouraged, he continued to simplify, working, he says to Oprah, “to make it easier, not to make it harder” to decipher his prose. Early modern English is notoriously cluttered with confounding punctuation, which did not become standardized until comparatively recently. McCarthy deems most other punctuation uses needless.Īside from his restrictive rationing of the colon, McCarthy declares his stylistic convictions with simplicity: “I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.” It’s a discipline he learned first in a college English class, where he worked to simplify 18th century essays for a textbook the professor was editing. The colon, one might say, genuflects to a very specific logical development, enumeration.
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Like, these are the reasons.” This is a specific occasion that does not present itself often. Of the colon, he says: “You can use a colon, if you’re getting ready to give a list of something that follows from what you just said. Speaking of writers who have imitated him, he says, “You really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks, and write in such a way as to guide people as to who’s speaking.” Otherwise, confusion reigns.Ĭareful McCarthy reader Oprah says she “saw a colon once” in McCarthy’s prose, but she never encountered a semicolon. McCarthy stresses that this way of writing dialogue requires particular deliberation. In his Oprah interview, he says MacKinlay Kantor was the first writer he read who left them out. So what “weird little marks” does McCarthy allow, or not, and why? Below is a brief summary of his stated rules for punctuation: I mean, if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate. There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. Joyce’s influence dominates, and in discussion of punctuation, McCarthy stresses that his minimalist approach works in the interest of maximum clarity. But in his very rare 2008 televised interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites two other antecedents: James Joyce and forgotten novelist MacKinlay Kantor, whose Andersonville won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Cormac McCarthy has been-as one 1965 reviewer of his first novel, The Orchard Tree, dubbed him-a “disciple of William Faulkner.” He makes admirable use of Faulknerian traits in his prose, and I’d always assumed he inherited his punctuation style from Faulkner as well.