On the Uses of Punctuation
Jul. 13th, 2006 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowIn a recent post, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ase launched a broadside against bad punctuation, and in particular against trailing ellipses. As an occasional user, I felt the need to protest this, and it quickly developed that we were in substantial agreement - that it was primarily their use as a simple substitute for periods that upset her.
At any rate, one of her other comments led me to thinking about punctuation in general, and I'm going to inflict some of those thoughts on... well, on anyone who cares to look under the cut.
First, some historical comments. English punctuation began to be standardized after about 1600; initially, there was a conflict between two schools of thought. One, the elocutionist school, felt that punctuation should be used to indicate how a speaker would deliver the words - when, and how long, he would pause, and the like. This had historical support; the punctuation schemes that had developed in the Middle Ages for Vulgar Latin and koïne Greek were largely of this nature. On the other hand, the syntactic school favored using punctuation to indicate the syntactic relations among parts of the discourse - marking the ends of complete thoughts, setting off dependent clauses, and so forth. By and large, the syntactic school won out (although, as often in such matters, vestiges of the elocutionist school persisted in elementary textbooks).
That the syntacticians were victorious seems natural to me. In particular, for academic work - for any work in which sentences of any degree of complexity are commonly used - it is vital to give the reader cues as to the structure of the sentence. The victory was never complete, of course; the epistolary novels of the 18th and 19th centuries show a great deal of variation in the use of punctuation in ordinary correspondence. (Casual correspondence is, after all, less likely to be syntactically complex.) Poetry, too, often took different directions; consider the idiosyncratic punctuation of Dickinson and cummings. Since poetry often thrives on allowing multiple interpretations of the same words, this really isn't too surprising.
Which brings me toase's point. She wrote that "I tend to hear the words I read, so a badly balanced sentence or paragraph can literally sound bad"; in other words, her inclination is toward the elocutionary school. So is mine, at least as regards casual online writing. One of the commonest problems in e-writing is the absence of such ordinary-speech cues as intonation and body language, and it seems to me that punctuation (and similar tools) should be brought to bear to fill the gap. (Emoticons and pseudo-HTML can also be used, but they seem kludgy to me.) Punctuation; the use of different fonts or other markers to indicate emphasis; the creative use of white space - all of these can, and I think should, be used to help "vocalize" the writing.
Of course, none of this will help unless readers are in the habit of "hearing" what they read, and in the hands of those who simply don't know how to deliver a speech it may well be useless. (I'm still a bit peeved by the fact that the minister at my mother's memorial service read the Dickinson poem I had selected with all the verve of a day-old fish.) But it's a start.
(As an aside, I note that in the constructed language Loglan, all "punctuation" is verbalized; that is, punctuation is realized by actual words, and can be written as words or as standard punctuation marks. One marker is the particle "I", which indicates that the speaker is continuing the same discourse in a new sentence. The "punctuation version" of this particle is, as it happens, a trailing ellipsis. Make of it what you will.)
ase launched a broadside against bad punctuation, and in particular against trailing ellipses. As an occasional user, I felt the need to protest this, and it quickly developed that we were in substantial agreement - that it was primarily their use as a simple substitute for periods that upset her.At any rate, one of her other comments led me to thinking about punctuation in general, and I'm going to inflict some of those thoughts on... well, on anyone who cares to look under the cut.
First, some historical comments. English punctuation began to be standardized after about 1600; initially, there was a conflict between two schools of thought. One, the elocutionist school, felt that punctuation should be used to indicate how a speaker would deliver the words - when, and how long, he would pause, and the like. This had historical support; the punctuation schemes that had developed in the Middle Ages for Vulgar Latin and koïne Greek were largely of this nature. On the other hand, the syntactic school favored using punctuation to indicate the syntactic relations among parts of the discourse - marking the ends of complete thoughts, setting off dependent clauses, and so forth. By and large, the syntactic school won out (although, as often in such matters, vestiges of the elocutionist school persisted in elementary textbooks).
That the syntacticians were victorious seems natural to me. In particular, for academic work - for any work in which sentences of any degree of complexity are commonly used - it is vital to give the reader cues as to the structure of the sentence. The victory was never complete, of course; the epistolary novels of the 18th and 19th centuries show a great deal of variation in the use of punctuation in ordinary correspondence. (Casual correspondence is, after all, less likely to be syntactically complex.) Poetry, too, often took different directions; consider the idiosyncratic punctuation of Dickinson and cummings. Since poetry often thrives on allowing multiple interpretations of the same words, this really isn't too surprising.
Which brings me to
ase's point. She wrote that "I tend to hear the words I read, so a badly balanced sentence or paragraph can literally sound bad"; in other words, her inclination is toward the elocutionary school. So is mine, at least as regards casual online writing. One of the commonest problems in e-writing is the absence of such ordinary-speech cues as intonation and body language, and it seems to me that punctuation (and similar tools) should be brought to bear to fill the gap. (Emoticons and pseudo-HTML can also be used, but they seem kludgy to me.) Punctuation; the use of different fonts or other markers to indicate emphasis; the creative use of white space - all of these can, and I think should, be used to help "vocalize" the writing.Of course, none of this will help unless readers are in the habit of "hearing" what they read, and in the hands of those who simply don't know how to deliver a speech it may well be useless. (I'm still a bit peeved by the fact that the minister at my mother's memorial service read the Dickinson poem I had selected with all the verve of a day-old fish.) But it's a start.
(As an aside, I note that in the constructed language Loglan, all "punctuation" is verbalized; that is, punctuation is realized by actual words, and can be written as words or as standard punctuation marks. One marker is the particle "I", which indicates that the speaker is continuing the same discourse in a new sentence. The "punctuation version" of this particle is, as it happens, a trailing ellipsis. Make of it what you will.)
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 05:35 am (UTC)Or maybe I do.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 01:07 pm (UTC)Interesting. Thanks!
I've had a comment that I use too many exclamation marks in my LJ/email, etc. I've noticed it myself, but I guess I've subconsciously felt that when writing it helps the lack of the ordinary speech cues you were talking about. But it's probably like the Ase's annoyance with the overuse of ellipses. It loses meaning when overused.
I've been trying to not use exclamation marks as much. :-)
I think I just got into the habit when first doing email, which was all personal at the time.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-17 11:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-17 12:38 pm (UTC)Well, thanks! That's certainly a positive argument to keep using them!! Or even two or three!!! ;-D
But in general, maybe it's not so bad to cut down on the use unless I really mean it! On the other hand, perhaps the comment was not a critique but more of a characterization! And such a characterization may not be such a bad thing!!!! ;-D
no subject
Date: 2006-07-24 08:09 pm (UTC)Anyhow, I tend to use too many exclamation marks. I'm really trying to cut back at least with work emails. I only use them now when I'm making a joke with someone I know fairly well, or if I really feel that the emphasis is necessary.
Still use them a fair bit in LJ posts and private emails.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-25 11:43 am (UTC)I think I don't tend to use them too much in serious work emails or anything, but I'm keeping an eye on it in general. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 02:24 pm (UTC)It also made me so ellipses-phobic that for a while there it actually cramped my own writing style. Because, after all, sometimes ellipses are actually... you know... appropriate....
And sometimes not.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 04:46 pm (UTC)I feel, when I use ellipses, that it is the grammatical equivalent of me verbally and in person apparently finishing a thought, face turned away, then quickly turning back and flashing a mischievious grin for a second.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 08:46 pm (UTC)An interesting consideration might be to look for parallels between exposure to people reading aloud and elocutionary/syntactic perspectives. I wonder if kids who are read aloud to expect books to have a "sound"?
no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 09:19 pm (UTC)I'm not sure about the suggestion in your second paragraph; I would assume that most writers of the 17th and 18th centuries would be used to recitation of poetry and such in school, whether they eventually became elocutionists or syntacticians.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-15 09:08 pm (UTC)Consciously I just punctuate where it looks like it needs it. The same way I spell. Nobody's complained so far...
Sorry. I love ending ellipses. They sound like a voice trailing off.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-17 05:09 pm (UTC)Sounds familiar; I've absorbed a lot of my writing style from what I've read, I suspect. And still tend to let what I'm reading influence how I write, which can be problematic when I've been reading, say, C. J. Cherryh.
Sorry. I love ending ellipses. They sound like a voice trailing off.
Which is exactly why I loathe their abuse. It's a tone of writing I associate with some people I don't like to hang out with, for their good and mine. (Have you ever found yourself talking louder and louder, and faster and faster, in a desperate attempt to get a non-monotone reaction from someone? Like I said, there are people I'm not hanging with for everyone's good.)
Trailing ellipses have their niche, but that niche isn't as large as some people seem to think. And I'm really one to talk; my grammatical quirk this month seems to be leading ellipses. As in, "...yeah, bad image, let's not do that." So I should probably calm down about other people's erratic punctuation.
need more marks
Date: 2006-07-19 08:59 pm (UTC)JP>habit of "hearing" what they read
I know I overuse both ellipses and dashes. And now I know why. Yes, it's eumulating speech.
But the trailing off of spoken thoughts can indicate either the end of thought or the continuation. "Find some money somewhere, but I dunno..." End of thinking. "Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison ..." Continues, etc, you know. All those guys.
Or both at the same time. "A neverending battle for Truth, justice, and -- uh -- that other thing ..." The actual thought / memory has reached its limit but the speaker wants to indicate that there is more to the thought than can actually be conveyed.
It seems to me there is a useful distinction to be drawn between the two types. As if in the one case you make the grasping at empty air gesture "nothing there" while in the other you made the twirling finger "and so on" gesture. Maybe "..." for the one and ". . ." for the other.
We also need a distinction between actual quotes and scare quotes and for Ghod's sake we need to stop the people who use quote marks for emphasis. I "really" hate that.
A useful though annoyingly overused marker of speech is the rising, questioning, inflection used to solict agreement and permission to continue. Y'know? Needs a new punctuation mark I think. Something like a little arrow pointing sideways and up -- maybe -^
I have this person -^ a woman -^ in my office where I work -^ who can't get through a paragraph, y' know -^ without that kind of rising tone-^ and who doesn't -- I mean it's not intended to be, like annoying -^ -- but it really is and she really ought to notice by now, wouldn't you think -^?
It's all still evolving. The change from underlining in handwriting and typing to italics in print and screen images has been quick and seems stable. It's an interesting time.
Re: need more marks
Date: 2006-07-19 09:17 pm (UTC)