British Theatre Guide Blog

I know and accept that language, being a living thing, has to change - although I do mourn some of these changes: to lose the distinction between “uninterested” and “disinterested” can only encourage sloppy thinking - but when it happens because one group of people simply don’t know, then it is something to be resisted - and complained about loudly!

Such is the misuse of the colon and semi-colon by press officers and others who write press releases. In their desperation to write like the lowest form of tabloid journalist, they actually exceed the tabloids’ twisting of the language and have started coming up with their own mutilations.

It started with writing sentences such as A spokesman said: “We do not…”   It’s a comma, boys and girls, not a colon.  It always has been and there is absolutely no reason to change it.

And then, because of the half-understood rule that a colon introduces a list, they started writing The cast includes: Joe Bloggs, Fred Smith…  No!  Not at all!  There is no need for that colon: it is included, by implication, in includes. 

Now they have started replacing commas in a list by semi-colons, so we get The cast includes: Joe Bloggs; Fred Smith; Anne Onymous…  Now there is a good reason for using semi-colons in some lists - where, for example, each noun is followed by a subordinate phrase or clause, so we could write, The cast includes Joe Bloggs, who, at the age of three, played Hamlet; Fred Smith, about whom Peter Lathan, the world’s greatest Shakespearean critic, said, “This man is a rubbish actor”; Anne Onymous…  In this situation, sticking to commas only would lack clarity, so the semi-colon is needed, but it isn emphatically not needed simply to separate items in a list, whether a list of things, nouns or verbs.

And while I am on the subject of press release writers, many years ago, before the advent of the personal computer, it was conventional to put names and titles in capital letters, to draw attention to them.  But now it is no longer necessary: word processing software allows us to use bold or italics and also allows the release recipient to copy and paste whole chunks of text into the story, thus cutting down on all the tedious retyping that we used to have to do.  So why do press release writers feel it necessary to use caps?  It just means the names, titles or whatever have to be retyped, thus displeasing the editor/journalist.

And another pet hate of mine: why put the name of the character an actor plays in single quotes, thus creating silly sentences like He played ‘Hamlet’ in the RSC production of “Hamlet”. 

Yes, I know you wouldn’t use the same word twice in such close proximity but I am merely making a point.

I know that the voice of one crying in the wilderness will not make a difference, but I just wanted to get it off my chest.  And that comma, by the way, is known as the “Oxford comma” and is perfectly acceptable.  Just because you have been taught that a comma replaces a conjunction does not mean they can’t be used together. Sometimes we do pause (for emphasis) before a conjunction.

End of rant!