Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

Periods
56 assorted things to do (and not to do) with punctuation
The stuff in the front

If words are the flesh, muscle, and bone of prose, punctuation is the breath. In support of the words you’ve carefully selected, punctuation is your best means of conveying to the reader how you want your writing to be read, how you want it to sound. A comma sounds different than a semicolon; parentheses make a different noise than dashes.

Some writers use punctuation with impressionistic flair, and as a copy editor I do my best to support that, so long as the result is comprehensible and consistent. Not all punctuation is a choice, though. Typing or not typing even so much as a comma—in fact, especially a comma—can convey key information. Make sure you use punctuation wisely.

Periods

1.

Those two-letter state abbreviations that the USPS—which I’m still tempted to style U.S.P.S. but won’t—likes to see on envelopes (MA, NY, CA, and the like) do not take periods. They also shouldn’t appear anywhere else but on envelopes and packages. In bibliographies and notes sections, and anywhere else you may need to abbreviate a state’s name, please stick to the old-fashioned and more attractive Mass., N.Y., Calif., and so on. Or just write the whole thing out.

2.

Some of us have a hard time dropping the periods from the abbreviation U.S., perhaps simply out of habit, perhaps because US looks to us like the (shouted) objective case of “we.” Some of us were also taught to use U.S. (or that other thing) only as an adjective, as in “U.S. foreign policy,” and to refer to the country nounwise only full-out as the United States. I persist in that distinction, because…because I do.

3.

Feel free to end a sentence shaped like a question that isn’t really a question with a period rather than a question mark. It makes a statement, doesn’t it.