I love a full stop. Full stop.
The full stop - or ‘period’. You know what it does? It ends a sentence and provides a definite pause.
Apparently, according the today’s newspapers, some sensitive Gen-Z souls see the full stop as a symbol of micro-aggression. I can ‘t believe they do, really. That’s absurd. Sorry. That’s absurd
Punctuation has a purpose. It has a job to do. I’m ready to stand up for full stop, come what may. (I love my commas and my colons and my semi-colons, too - but we can leave them for another day. And as for the ellipsis . . . Don’t get me started!)
In texts and tweets and even e-mails some people seem to think any punctuation unnecessary. Wrong. So wrong! Yes of course you can write a brief message without punctuation it will probably be understood but it’s a bad habit to get into. (See what I did there?) It may take you marginally less time to write, but it will almost certainly take the intended recipient marginally longer to absorb. That is why, for example, in the age of the telegram, when you paid for each word used, senders were ready to pay to include the word STOP if it helped make their message more comprehensible.
What were telegrams? Telegrams were telegraphic communications, originally sent by Morse Code, that when received by the telegraphic office were written or typed up in words and then delivered to the intended recipient by hand.
Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen (1862 – 1910) was an American medicine man who was hanged for the murder of his wife, having been the first suspect in criminal history to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy. The murder took place in London and Dr Crippen and his accomplice were making their escape by sea, crossing the Atlantic to North America, when their ship’s captain recognised them and sent this telegram to the British authorities:
HAVE STRONG SUSPICIONS THAT CRIPPEN LONDON CELLAR MURDERER AND ACCOMPLICE ARE AMONG SALOON PASSENGERS STOP MUSTACHE TAKEN OFF GROWING BEARD STOP ACCOMPLICE DRESSED AS BOY STOP MANNER AND BUILD UNDOUBTEDLY A GIRL STOP
Pedants might like to have seen an extra STOP after MUSTACHE TAKEN OFF, but no matter: the telegram did the trick. Dr Crippen was duly arrested, tried and executed. Full stop.
In the United States, Western Union abandoned its telegram service in 2006. When I was in my twenties and we still had a telegram service in the UK (it ended here in 1982) I sent them all the time. I worked in the theatre then and relished the extravagance involved in all those STOPS. ‘When an actor has money,’ said the Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov, ‘he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.’
In Russia, Japan and Mexico they still have a telegram service, but in Europe it is only Italy that now maintains a tradition that you might have thought the text, tweet and e-mail had made redundant. Over the years probably the most famous telegram to come out of Italy was the one sent by the American journalist Robert Benchley to his editor at the New Yorker, Harold Ross, when Benchley arrived in Venice for the first time: ‘STREETS FULL OF WATER STOP PLEASE ADVISE’.
Another of my telegram favourites was sent by the great American film director, Billy Wilder, in the mid-1950s when he was in Paris making a movie. It was at the time when the bidet was coming into fashion in the US as a must-have bathroom accessory and the then Mrs Wilder, back in Los Angeles, was determined to have one. She instructed her husband to buy her a bidet while he was filming in France and get it shipped over to Hollywood. Unfortunately, so great had been the recent demand for bidets, when Wilder went out in search of one he failed to find it. He wired his wife with the news: ‘UNABLE FIND BIDET STOP SUGGEST HEADSTAND IN SHOWER STOP’.
In a nutshell, in contemporary written English full stops are used:
to mark the end of a sentence that is a complete statement:
You are reading my blog. Thank you.
to mark the end of a group of words that don’t form a conventional sentence, so as to emphasise a statement:
You are reading my blog. My blog. Wow. Thank you.·
in some abbreviations, for example etc., e.g., Jan., Feb., a.m., p.m.:
Gyles is including lots of asides, anecdotes, incidental stories etc. in his blog that may not be as amusing as he thinks.
(If an abbreviation with a full stop comes at the end of a sentence, you don’t need to add another full stop:
He really loves his asides, anecdotes, incidental stories, etc. Bless. )
· + in website and email addresses:
The full stop is the most fundamental of all the punctuation marks. Essentially, think of the full stop as the moment when you take a proper breath before moving on.
Many writers of note use a lot of full stops. To add urgency to their writing. And impact. This is the opening line of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451:
It was a pleasure to burn.
This is the beginning of the closing chapter of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre:
Reader, I married him.
Ernest Hemingway loved a short sentence. He knew how to pack a punch. Famously, when challenged to conjure up a complete short story in just six words, he came up with this, in the process using a colon, a comma and a full stop to considerable effect:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Hemingway knew that writing well isn’t easy. ‘I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,’ he admitted to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. ‘I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.’ No shit.
As a rule, shorter sentences are preferable to longer ones. But don’t overdo it. Please. It can feel mannered. And be irritating.
The opposite is quite as true. With an overlong sentence, the reader is likely to get lost. Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, and Vladimir Nabokov are celebrated for their long sentences. James Joyce was notorious for his. His 1922 novel, Ulysses, features a sentence that runs to 4,391 words. Jonathan Coe went three times better with his 2001 novel, The Rotter’s Club, managing to conjure up a single sentence of 13,955 words. (You’ll have to take that from me. I don’t have the space to quote it.)
I love a full stop. Full stop.