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: 2006-07-15 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.