So I'm sharing something dear to my heart - my love of punctuation. Tragic I know.
I'm pretty good with most punctuation (don't use this blog to attest to that - this is my informal communications forum), but forward slashes have been frustrating me.
My feeling has been that they should conform to the conventions of other punctuation such as the full stop or the comma. That is, full stops and commas come directly after a word, but have a space after them. So my personal style preference has been to do this - word/ next word. Trouble is, my clients always go through my work and query why I have done this. Hence, I've decided to scrap this style in my editing.
So I wanted to find out the convention. Surprisingly, not many websites dedicated to punctuation tackle the use of the forward slash, but I did find quite a lot of online discussions on their use.
And the verdict is ...
If you are using a forward slash to separate two phrases, put a space before and after the forward slash (eg: pay by credit card / pay by money order). This rule also applies if you have a phrase on one side of the forward slash and a single word on the other side (eg: credit card / cash).
If you are using a forward slash to separate two short words, don't put a space on either side of of the forward slash (eg: credit/cash).
That leaves us with long words separated by a forward slash and for this, I am making up my own rule. I'm going to say, if both words separated by the forward slash have eight or more letters, a space is required on each side of the forward slash (eg: elephant / kangaroo). My reasoning for this is that a very long stretch of continuous text can look odd within a paragraph. I wonder if my new rule will catch on!
There are loads of other issues related to forward slashes such as long html addresses that fill more than one line of text and any use of a forward slash that requires the information after the forward slash to spill over onto the next line. I'll investigate this and get back to you.
Thanks for indulging me!
Love it! At last, a definitive ruling on forward slashes. Good one, Kirsty.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I'm a stickler for consistency and writing with the audience in mind. I think there should be a space on either side of the forward slash, so the text doesn't look squashed, it's easy to read, and there's less chance the audience will need to re-read the text to understand it's meaning.
ReplyDeleteIf you think about it, a forward slash is most often used as shorthand for "or", and if you type out "or" you'd put a space on either side of it ... I see no reason why it should be any different in shorthand.
e.g. his / her, rather than his/her. In this example, the forward slash represents the word "or" and you would put a space before and after "or" if you typed it out in longhand ...
don't want my audience to trip over a sentence because a couple of words separated by a forward slash aren't immediately recognisable and need a re-read.
What do you think about the idea of abiding by the convention that you put punctuation immediately after a word and then a space after the punctuation? Ie: Bonnie/ Kirsty/ Michelle. This makes the most sense to me, but people don't seem to like it.
ReplyDeletePunctuation, like language, is ever evolving and needs to meet the needs of the modern reader / target audience. I think it's important to choose a punctuation style that you're comfortable with, make any changes to it that you think are necessary (to meet the needs of most of your readers / audience), and then stick to it. Consistency consistency consistency. :)
ReplyDeleteFinally someone understood my sentiments on this topic!
ReplyDelete