Polish Punctuation Peculiarities

As a former copyeditor and proofreader, I found one article of particular interest in this week’s newsletter from Culture.pl: Alicja Zapalska’s (2021) Pen to Paper: Mastering the Quirks of Polish Writing. Excerpts follow. Periods in unexpected places, paragraphs full of dashes, and mysterious abbreviations abound in Polish writing. Here are a few tips to make sense of the Polish language’s unique style and punctuation (language proficiency not included). Reading and writing might be the bane of any intermediate foreign-language speaker – now, not only do words have to be spelled right, there’s also a whole new set of writing rules to contend with. The bad news is, there are just enough differences in writing styles between Polish and English that intelligibility is not always guaranteed. The good news? At least it’s the same alphabet (sort of)! Where’s the Dialogue? Glancing at a page of Polish dialogue might feel a bit like looking at Morse code. Instead of using a quotation mark at…