Humour me. Go to the corner of the room and pull up the carpet. Underneath you’ll find a copy of The Courier.
In truth, you probably won’t find an old newspaper unless it is a carpet or linoleum (there’s a word rarely seen these days) that has been in place for decades. Paper below carpet or lino, as underlay and insulation, was routine in days of yore.
Anyway, if you did leaf through an old Courier you wouldn’t see many of these: – dashes. Whereas nowadays dashes are scattered – like this – throughout. Have a look through today’s paper – you’ll see what I mean.
Dashes are more often used in all writing, not just in The Courier, than they used to be. Frankly, there are too many. They are employed instead of commas, brackets, and colons. This, to an older eye, looks odd. It is better, surely, to use commas, brackets, and colons!
I think dashes spoil the look of newspaper columns, especially those of narrow measure with justified lines. Spaces are inserted either side of the dash so garish gaps gape. Distracting, meaningless, wasted space. Commas are much less intrusive.
Worse than the aesthetics, dashes are a dumbing-down of punctuation. Unsure where a comma goes? Put in a dash. Baffled by brackets? Dish up dashes. Ignorant of the rules for colons? Dash it all!
I find it especially strange when dashes are sown through direct quotes. I don’t think people speak in dashes, which is hardly surprising as they are difficult to pronounce.
Fashions in grammar change. Sentences are shorter than was the norm a century ago. And “data” is now used as a singular (although I remain shocked by this). But I don’t believe changing trends are the root of dashmania. Today’s slapdash approach to punctuation is a result of failing to teach children how to parse a sentence.
Students aren’t properly instructed in the relationships between verbs, nouns, subjects, and objects. They don’t understand how these elements are arranged into clauses; which combine to make sentences. Therefore, they don’t know how to punctuate to show where these things start and finish.
Instead of structuring a sentence properly, dashes stitch together various thoughts, facts, statements, and descriptions into a Frankensteinian monster. An unnatural sentence is the result.
This is a failing of the Curriculum for Excellence. It doesn’t allow time for teaching of the basics. We expect young people to construct elegant, grammatically-sound sentences without properly explaining to them what a sentence is.
Learning to parse a sentence is the best way to avoid dashing all over the place.
Word of the week
Parse (verb)
To divide a sentence into its grammatical parts and identify their relations to one another. EG: “Students used to parse sentences with ease.”
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
