What do new authors hate even more than agents who don’t acknowledge their manuscripts? The apostrophe! Why? It’s like a Christmas gift from an uncle with poor taste. They don’t know where to put it. That was clearly the dilemma of councillors in Mid-Devon this month when they ruled to banish all apostrophes from the county’s street names ‘to avoid confusion’. At a stroke, or lack of it, they have turned ‘Baker’s View’ into ‘Bakers View’, a haiku of enchanting ambiguity. Does ‘Bakers View’ still mean a view once taken by Sir Samuel Baker, the Victorian explorer, after whom the street was named? Or a stance traditionally assumed by local bakers at the summer solstice when they gather to view the rising of the dough? Or does it now mean nothing at all, like a novel by Martin Amis? Yes, punctuation matters! It’s also a dilemma. If we get it wrong as authors, agents won’t read beyond our cover letter. Get it right and somebody in a different culture will chide us for illiteracy....

In recent years, I’ve read a couple of books by highly-acclaimed literary authors who use no punctuation. Well, almost none. They don’t use quotation marks for dialogue. Cormack McCarthy is one, and I do not want to read another of his books because it drives me absolutely crazy. (And that’s a short trip!)  On the other hand, the novel Dirt Music by Tim Winton didn’t bother me as much. I think because the dialogue was properly attributed with actions, reactions or taglines. And the author started a new paragraph for each new speaker. McCarthy doesn’t always, and sometimes refers to two different characters as “he” a couple of times within the same paragraph. Confusing? To say the least. That said, McCarthy is a best-selling author and has won many awards. He knows his literature and he knows the rules. I always tell my writing students and editing clients that it may seem like we are spending a lot of time on “rules” when maybe we should be concentrating on writing. But…we ...