Editing Awkward squad (section)

==Literary use==

[[John Clare]], an English peasant poet, wrote with his own spelling and no punctuation. He complained in the 1820s to his editors that people could understand him, and he refused to use "that awkward squad of colon, semi-colon, comma, and full stop", according to the display in the [[John Clare Cottage]], in [[Helpston]].

In Canto 7, stanza 52 of [[Lord Byron|Byron]]'s ''[[Don Juan (Byron)|Don Juan]]'', the Russian general [[Alexander Suvorov|Suvorov]] (or "Suwarrow" as Byron anglicizes it) is described training the 'awkward squad' prior to the battle of Ismail.

[[Thomas Babington Macaulay]], in his 1842 essay on [[Frederic the Great]], used the phrase to describe the army of Frederic's father.

In her 1853 novel ''[[Villette (novel)|Villette]]'', [[Charlotte Brontë]] writes of M. Paul Emanuel: "Irritable he was; one heard that, as he apostrophized with vehemence the awkward squad under his orders." Brontë had also used the phrase four years earlier, in ''[[Shirley (novel)|Shirley]]''.

In Chapter 16 of ''[[Our Mutual Friend]]'' (1864–65), [[Charles Dickens]] described the character Sloppy as a "Full-Private Number One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life".

[[Norman Cameron (poet)|Norman Cameron]] used the words to end his 1950 poem ''Forgive me, sire''.