Bonus. Do you really need that comma? Should your dashes have spaces? Is there ever just one "right" way to punctuate? June Casagrande, author of "The Best Punctuation Book, Period," busts punctuation myths, compares style guides, and looks at the surprising complexity of the humble em dash.
Bonus. Do you really need that comma? Should your dashes have spaces? Is there ever just one "right" way to punctuate? June Casagrande, author of "The Best Punctuation Book, Period," busts punctuation myths, compares style guides, and looks at the surprising complexity of the humble em dash.
Find June Casagrande at grammarunderground.com.
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MIGNON: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians! I am here with June Casagrande, a language columnist for the Los Angeles Times, for the community section, and author of five books about language, including one of my favorite reference books, "The Best Punctuation Book, Period." We just finished the main segment where we talked about, that book, her other books, "It Was the Best of Sentences. It Was the Worst of Sentences." She's got three more that we didn't even talk about. No, we did mention "Grammar Snobs are Great Big Meanies," her first book, which is great fun, but in this segment, we're going to talk about, what she thinks is the most difficult punctuation mark, how she's been doing editing AI, and then we'll get her book recommendations. June, thank you so much for being here.Â
JUNE: Thank you for having me, Mignon.Â
MIGNON: Yeah, so we talked about dashes in the previous segment and the surprising opinions that people have about them and the funny ways they use spaces about them, but I don't think dashes are actually the most difficult punctuation mark.
Which one do you think is the most difficult?
JUNE: The most difficult punctuation mark? I think the hardest one for people to pick up, use, and rely on is the period. I think it's, I think it's power. It's not difficult to use, but I think it's power is a little misunderstood. Use it a lot. Short sentences have incredible impact. Obviously, you don't want every sentence to be short, but use it a lot. I think the colon can be, like, legit difficult, though, because people don't know whether to space after it. People don't know whether to start with a capital after it. But of all, it's got to be the apostrophe. Plurals and possessives and plural possessives and contractions are an absolute mess in English and almost no one, including most of the writers I edit, can tell you how to punctuate. Williamses, when you're talking about the Williamses's house, it's, so apostrophes are almost by design, cruel, and difficult.
MIGNON: That is true. I love your perspective on the period though. That's great. I never would have thought of that. But, and I would have said the comma because there are so many different ways to use it, but also I think I have to agree with you about the apostrophe because I had one TikTok video that went like semi-viral, and it was about the apostrophe, and it was because everyone was arguing in the comments about whether I was right or wrong with the advice I gave, and it just was an insane flame war, which blew it up to get, hundreds of thousands of views.
And it was all because the apostrophe is so confusing. So I think I have to agree with you in the end on that.
JUNE: The comma is loose. It's … you're right. There are a lot of areas where should I use one here? Should I not use one here? And it can be consequential. Getting it wrong can be consequential. It can have a big effect on meaning, but apostrophes just, they kill everybody, even the pros.Â
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. I agree.Â
JUNE: The mere fact that the word "its" possessive doesn't have an apostrophe, whereas the "dog's tail" has an apostrophe, but "its tail" doesn't, that's just the beginning of how difficult they are.Â
MIGNON: It's so confusing. And, I interviewed Aamon Shea once. and he was looking at the history of it and saying nobody has ever known how to use the apostrophe from the beginning of when it emerged. It's always been a mystery.
JUNE: Interesting. Yeah. I'll buy that.Â
MIGNON: Yeah. So I know I saw you mentioned, online. I think that you're editing more and more AI. I think you said slop these days, and I'm really curious how that's coming about, how it's going, where you think it's going in the future. I just want to hear about your experience with that.Â
JUNE: I'm a little less intimidated by AI than I used to. Theoretically, AI is coming for my job. If I'm an editor, I do proofreading, even if I do writing, the conventional wisdom says, this just keeps getting better. This technology keeps getting better. It's just a matter of time before you're out of work. I've always accepted that. I don't think it's necessarily untrue, but it's not there yet. AI writing is, it has very serious weaknesses. One of them being it doesn't understand what's important to readers. Another being it can't reason. It doesn't get the logical problems of things it says. For example, I had an AI piece that I constructed myself that said these two business partners who started this business have been doing wonderful whatever since their inception.Â
AI thought we were, it didn't understand that inception could apply to a business, but not to the business owners. That would be their conception. And I don't think that's any of the AI program's business. But, so I'm less afraid that it'll take my job next year than I was.Â
MIGNON: And why is it that you're spending so much more time with it? Is it that your clients are asking you to use it or sending you stuff that they used, AI to make? Why are you working on it so much more?Â
JUNE: Mostly the latter. Most of my copy editing and proofreading work is for a large newspaper group called Lee Enterprises. They have 70 odd newspapers. Their best known one is probably the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and I work on sponsored content. I do not work on editorial content for them, and that is coming from clients who want to publish articles that are both readable, but promotional, which is why it'll say sponsored above them.
And they're all finding it much more affordable to ask ChatGPT or whatever other program to write their stuff. And ChatGPT can write an article in a very, in an impressively clear and professional voice, but it can't, it doesn't have the … it doesn't have the skill, personality, it doesn't have the something, I can't even put my finger on it, that you get with good professional writers, and it's full of pitfalls.
The copy is completely full of pitfalls, because you never know when it's going to say something wrong, illogical, libelous, or out of sync with the word's definition.
MIGNON: And do you find that it takes you as much time to fix it as it would have to write it yourself? I've heard people say that. I've also heard people say that's not true. So what do you think in your experience?
JUNE: Most of the copy that comes to me that I know is from AI that is specifically for these sponsored content articles I talked about pretty clean overall. It's … I don't have to spend more time correcting it than I would have to writing it myself. There's another category of article I edit that are just called "compliance reads" that are extremely low-quality stories that we're not even paid to edit.
We're just paid to post under the newspapers URLs. They don't even want us editing it because they just want the cheapest way to get online and get in their search engine results. Those are a mess. So I don't know what the difference is between the two. I don't know if in the former the clients are saying "Okay, let's make this good." And in the latter, in these compliance reads we do, they don't care. They just slop it; they just want the hits. They just want the search engine results. Or if there's something else going on. But, most of the stuff I do, no, it's not bad. ChatGPT is not a bad writer. It's just not a reliable writer, and it's not a good writer.
MIGNON: Yeah. That's interesting. The compliance. That sounds disturbing. The compliance posts that they're, the point is to get them into search results?
JUNE: Yes. Yes. Yes. And you can't even find them, these articles, from the newspapers websites. You can only see any affiliation with the newspaper in the URL in the Google search results, and that's what they're paying for. They just wanted to go up like that.
MIGNON: So they, know they're bad, and they're hiding them.Â
JUNE: They don't care. Oh, you mean the, oh, the newspaper cares?
It's, no, this is the product they're selling. the newspaper would not, let anything in the, any sponsored content associated with the newspaper that's that bad quality appear. The newspapers care, the company cares for these other ones that are completely severed from the newspapers. It's the client that doesn't care at all. They just, if you Google something like "10 best protein powders," you're not gonna read it. You're gonna skim it. You're going to see the first one. The first one is the one that paid for the article. That kind of thing. That's very common. They don't care how that, they don't care how that, how that copy reads. They just want all the first Google page search results to be articles that list their product first.
MIGNON: So reader beware. Listener beware. People, if you're searching for "top 10 protein powders," probably don't put much weight in those top-10 lists anymore.
MIGNON: Yeah. Yeah. Let's cheer ourselves up by talking about great books. So what, are your three, pleasure reading book recommendations?Â
JUNE: Unrelated to language, right?Â
MIGNON: Unrelated to language. We want, great novels, your favorite cookbook, narrative nonfiction, something like that.Â
JUNE: Really into Patrick Radden Keefe lately. He wrote "Empire of Pain" about the Sackler family. So good. So good. I love a good villain, and he's so good at showing real world people who have done bad things as people. I just want to rail out and I'm so mad at this person. Loved "Empire of Pain."
He is also the author of "Say Nothing," which is about the Irish Republican army, which was made into a series,Â
MIGNON: Oh, I just finished that book. I just finished that book. It was great.Â
JUNE: Yeah, he's wonderful. I love him.Â
MIGNON: And the "Empire of Pain" for the Sackler family, for people who don't know, that's about the opioid epidemic. The Opioid Crisis.
JUNE: Yeah, and he goes back three generations in that family and looks at some of their business practices in a way that kept me turning pages all night. Yeah.
MIGNON: Before we start, that was about, there was a book that was like that, that I really enjoyed, and the name is escaping me, but it was about, it was, the, Elizabeth, the young blonde woman who faked the deep voice and did the blood startup. Can you, did you read that book?Â
JUNE: I did not.Â
MIGNON: It was amazing. And I was thinking of it when you were We're recommending that book, but I …Â
JUNE: Holmes. Elizabeth Holmes.Â
MIGNON: Holmes! Yeah. And the book about it. If you liked that, you will like that other book, because it was the same. You're like, at the end, you're like, I hate them.Â
JUNE: I love that feeling. I don't know if that's healthy, but it's how I read.
MIGNON: Yeah. Okay. and what's another book? What's another great book?
JUNE: One of my favorite books that I've read in the last ten years is … one of my favorite books of the last 10 years is "From Russia with Blood," and it's by a team of reporters from BuzzFeed News Heidi Blake, I believe is the name of one of them. It's about a number of Russian oligarchs and their associates in the United Kingdom who started dropping dead. And it's so good that they get into what they did to drop dead.
And it doesn't touch much on stuff going on in the United States. It's just a really good crime story about big dark crime and people living wild lifestyles. I loved it.Â
MIGNON: How many of them, when I always hear about them going out windows, like falling. Was that like half of them?
JUNE: A whole lot of them went out windows, but they get creative sometimes. Some of them died in car accidents. One of them, Boris Berezovsky, was found having committed suicide with his favorite scarf in his bathroom when he had plans. He had plans to go do stuff and he was, I do not think Boris Berezovsky committed suicide with his favorite scarf. And of course the poisonings are a favorite. And yeah, they love to kill. So it's a great book. "From Russia with Blood." I loved it.
MIGNON: Great. And what's your last one?
JUNE: Okay. And another great book I read recently, I got, this is a Christmas present, was "The God of the Woods" by Liz Moore. It's a mystery novel. It's in the 1970s. Set at a summer camp where a young camper, teenage camper, goes missing a decade or so after her younger brother went missing and never, was found again. It's a good, it's a good read. I enjoyed it,Â
MIGNON: Yeah. Like a mystery thriller?Â
JUNE: Mystery thriller with some surprise elements to it. I'm trying not to give away the ending. But yeah, I have, I love good mystery thrillers. I definitely count this as one. I've gotten away from them. I've been reading a lot of I've been really enjoying some nonfiction lately. And the other book that was a contender for my top three, is called "Spillover." It's by an author named David Quammen, and it's about how viruses enter animal viruses. It's about how animal viruses enter into human populations, and it's just really exciting and interesting. So "Spillover" was written well before the COVID pandemic, but it gives a deep understanding of how this pandemic could have happened in less conspiratorial ways than some people would like to believe. It's the hard science with no horse in this race, which makes it a great read, and it's fascinating and it foreshadows the danger that human populations are in without having to get into sides on what truth is factual.
It's a great read.
MIGNON: That sounds wonderful. I'm glad we did four. Thank you so much for those good recommendations. And thank you for being here again, June Casagrande.Â
Where do people find you?Â
JUNE: My pleasure. I have a website at grammarunderground.com.Â
MIGNON: Great. Thank you.Â
JUNE: Thank you.