Missing punctuation

Cormac McCarthy

Novelist Cormac McCarthy once explained to Oprah Winfrey why he doesn't use quotation marks in his books. "If you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate. ... I believe in periods and capitals and the occasional comma, and that's it."

So why do I find this statement so annoying? Partly it's the phrase "if you write properly," which sounds like a slam against the 99 percent of the world's writers who do use punctuation. We could make a long list of great writers who have used quotation marks — not to mention dashes and question marks, both of which I have already used in this blog post.

I would agree that exclamation points are usually unnecessary, but most punctuation serves the valuable purpose of making it clear to readers what the writer is trying to say. So if it helps both the writer and the reader, how can it be a bad idea? And who is Cormac McCarthy to define what proper writing is?

McCarthy is hardly the only writer to omit quotation marks. In the short story collection We Live in Water that I reviewed here a few days ago, Jess Walter sometimes uses them in his stories, but usually not. Often he uses a dash to start a quotation. The end of the paragraph signals the end. Sometimes quotes are in italics. In the story "Anything Helps," he uses nothing at all, giving us passages like this (italics mine):

I know that, he says.

Next time I'll call the police.

He begins backing away. Won't be a next time.

You said that last spring.

Backing away: I know. I'm sorry.

You can figure out where the quotation marks belong, what's speech and what's description. But why should you have to figure it out? Punctuation would have made it easier for everyone. Cormac McCarthy might call that proper writing. I call it a gimmick.

More annoying than missing punctuation, and also illustrated by those lines from Jess Walter, is the failure of so many writers to make it clear who's saying what. After the initial "he says," readers must keep track in their minds whose turn it is to speak. After three paragraphs or so, that becomes more difficult to do. One more "he says" or "she says" in a conversation would made everything clearer, with or without quotation marks.