Making a Point (10 page)

An Asterisk, or small star *, directs the reader to some note in the margin, or at the bottom of a page. Two or three asterisks generally denote the omission of some letters in a word, or of some bold or indelicate expression, or some defect in the manuscript.

None of this information comes from his thinking as a grammarian. It derives from his experience as a reader and from working with printers.

A century on from Horace Hart, nothing much seems to have changed with respect to punctuation. Grammars and style manuals keep saying rules have exceptions. Copy-editors regularly debate best practice. Rows between publishers and authors continue, as do rows between teachers and politicians. Children may have their homework corrected in different ways by different teachers in the same school. The average adult, left with a legacy of uncertainty, buys a self-help manual and then finds it doesn't solve the problem. Popular guides, such as Lynne Truss's
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
, do a grand job persuading people that punctuation matters, and that we need standards, but do not give a complete account of what those standards are, or provide an explanation of all the variation that exists. Matters then come to the boil, as they did in 2013, when teachers and parents find their children are having answers marked wrong in school punctuation tests solely because the examiners have discounted what is actually a widely accepted usage (see
Chapter 26
).

It seems as if the problem of punctuation is insoluble. But looking at it from the point of view of modern linguistics, this is only because people have been approaching the subject in an incomplete way, opting for partial accounts, and ignoring some critical factors. In particular, the kind of grammatical approach we've seen so far hasn't been as helpful as it needed to be. Although a great deal of what Lowth, Murray, and
their disciples had to say was accurate enough, and would be echoed in any modern grammar, their accounts were short, selective, artificial in their prescriptions, and unbalanced in their coverage. The parts of speech were treated in some detail, but the description of sentence structure, and the way elements of the sentence interacted, was superficial. This is a deficit that would not be corrected until the emergence of descriptive grammars during the twentieth century; but it had immediate consequences for the way these authors presented punctuation.

To give just one illustration of what I mean: as we'll see in
Chapter 13
, there is a hierarchy of importance in punctuation, relating to the hierarchy that exists in grammar. All grammars agree that the sentence is the most important feature, and should be dealt with first. We would therefore expect the first mark to be treated in any account of punctuation to be the period, as this is the main way in which a sentence is identified. But traditional accounts all begin with the comma – even Wilson's, who totally accepted the need for a grammatical approach – and don't deal with periods until after they've worked their way through semicolons and colons. It's easy to see why. They are following the old system of pause length, beginning with the shortest pause and moving towards the largest. But how can we understand the role of the marks that occur within sentences if we have not first understood the marks that identify sentences as wholes? We need a more sophisticated sense of grammatical structure if we're going to make progress in developing a more satisfactory approach to punctuation.

We also need a more comprehensive frame of reference. History clearly shows us that a phonetic approach, focusing on the impact of punctuation on listening and speaking, is not the whole story. Nor is the whole story told through a
grammatical approach, focusing on the way punctuation is used in reading and writing. Some sort of combined account is essential. But neither of these approaches can provide the whole solution to the problem because the factors that account for divided usage involve issues that fall outside of these domains. In particular, the subjectivity that seems to be inherent in punctuation – for every writer refers to it – has to be acknowledged. If we want a complete explanation of the way punctuation marks are used, we need to incorporate a further two perspectives that have received only passing mention in my historical account: semantics and pragmatics.

11

The way forward: meanings and effects

One of the messages that comes across loud and clear over the centuries is that punctuation is all about meaning. That's the bottom line, whether we think of the written language as something to be read aloud or to be read in silence. It's the need to make the meaning of a written text clear that motivates our use of punctuation. Clarity. Making sense. Avoiding ambiguity. These are the words that turn up over and over in books and essays on punctuation. Authors continually stress the need to bear meaning or sense in mind when thinking about which mark to use. David Steel: ‘Punctuation should lead to the sense.' John Wilson: ‘The chief aim in pointing a discourse, and its several branches, is to develop, as clearly as possible, the
meaning
of the writer.' Meaning is the subject-matter of
semantics
, which is why a
semantic
approach to punctuation is important. Grammar plays a critical role in making sense, but other aspects of language contribute too, such as vocabulary and the way we talk about our tones of voice (
he said briskly
). When we are thinking of how to express something in writing, or working out what a piece of writing means, we take all these semantic cues into account.

But semantics alone is not enough to account for the way we use language. Often we're faced with a
choice
when we want to express a particular meaning – a choice that conveys different intentions or effects. In grammar, for example, we have the choice of writing
I will
or
I'll
: the meaning is the
same, but the effect is different – the second usage is more informal than the first. Similarly, in punctuation we are sometimes offered a choice of forms, such as whether to use a comma or not, or whether to use single or double inverted commas, and we need to know what the consequences are of using one rather than the other. Authors continually stress the need for punctuation to be effective – to help orators or writers elicit a desired response in their listeners or readers – and this is a matter of choosing the right marks. Authors also find it important that a page should ‘look' right, and this too is a matter of choosing the right marks. Making choices is at the heart of
pragmatics
, which is why a
pragmatic
approach to punctuation is important. It's here that we will explore many of the loose ends that we've seen bedevilling earlier accounts, such as references to a writer's ‘judgement' or ‘taste'.

We need to use both perspectives, semantic and pragmatic, when evaluating punctuation. If you find it difficult to understand what someone has written because of the way punctuation has been used, then you're reacting semantically. But if you don't like the look of what someone has written – saying, for example, that a page is ‘cluttered' – then you're reacting pragmatically. Pragmatics is a particularly important perspective because it focuses on
explaining
rather than simply describing usage. Why did we use a particular punctuation mark? Why didn't we use some other mark instead? What was the intention of the writer? What was the effect upon the reader? The answers take us into a world well beyond linguistics, as they are to do with the writer's social background, cognitive skills, occupation, education, and aesthetic sensibility. No account of punctuation will ever succeed if it doesn't consider all these factors. And no-one will ever learn to punctuate well – or teach punctuation well – if they remain unaware of these factors, and how they interact.

The semantic approach is the one we see represented throughout the history of punctuation. As we saw earlier, it was the chief concern of many writers in antiquity, such as St Augustine, worrying over the ambiguity of signs, and it provides a continuous theme in later writing. During the eighteenth century especially, we find innumerable teaching exercises in which the student has to add marks to an unpunctuated piece of text in order to show its meaning. There are many ingenious examples. One of my favourites is the sentence used by the anonymous author of
The Expert Orthographist
(1704):

Christ saith St Peter died for us.

The author invites us to consider what would happen if we put a comma after
saith
, as opposed to two commas, after
Christ
and
Peter
. It's an early instance of
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
. In all such cases, punctuation resolves the difference between two (or more) meanings. This is semantics.

Teachers in the nineteenth century used to play semantic punctuation games, to make their students aware of the importance of the subject. This verse was very well known:

Every lady in this land

Hath twenty nails upon each hand;

Five and twenty on hands and feet:

And this is true, without deceit.

The student has to work out what has gone wrong, and present a correctly punctuated alternative:

Every lady in this land

Hath twenty nails; upon each hand

Five; and twenty on hands and feet:

And this is true, without deceit.

Percival Leigh does similar things in a short chapter on punctuation in his
Comic English Grammar
(1840). He recommends that a student consider ‘the different effects which a piece of poetry, for instance, which he has been accustomed to regard as sublime or beautiful, will have, when liberties are taken with it in that respect'. And he takes liberties with Shakespeare to illustrate his approach, such as Macbeth's exclamation to his frightened servant:

Where get'st thou that goose look?

which he rewrites as:

Where get'st thou that goose? Look!

Teachers do the same sort of thing today.

The pragmatic approach can be illustrated from one of the main trends that affected punctuation during the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, people were showing their addresses in correspondence like this:

Mr. J. B. Smith,

144, Central Ave.,

London, S.W.1.

By the late 1900s, it was like this:

Mr J B Smith

144 Central Ave

London SW1

There's no difference in meaning between these two examples; but there is a major difference in fashion. A heavily punctuated style was normal at the beginning of the twentieth century; a punctuation minimalism at the end. This is pragmatics.

The pragmatic approach is not so often encountered in early writing on punctuation, though it's there in antiquity when writers discuss how to punctuate a text so that orators can be more effective in getting their message across. But pragmatic judgements about the use of punctuation increased as writing became stylistically more diverse. By the eighteenth century, legal, religious, journalistic, and historical writing had each developed its individual style of punctuation. As a result, to judge the punctuation in a piece of writing it became necessary not only to ask ‘Is it clear?', but also ‘Is it appropriate?' And a punctuation style that would be judged acceptable in one set of circumstances might well be judged unacceptable in another.

We need both semantic and pragmatic perspectives if we're to develop the kind of combined approach to punctuation I recommended at the end of the previous chapter. Successful communication, whether through speaking or writing, requires that we express ourselves clearly, and present our language in a way that allows our intention to be effectively conveyed to our addressee(s). And with each written communicative act, we need to make a decision as to whether we need punctuation – and if so, what kind – to enable this to happen.

Our choice of punctuation is going to be chiefly guided by semantic or pragmatic considerations. Normally, it will be semantics: we will aim to make our meaning clear to the reader. But there are occasions when pragmatic factors take precedence: we can decide to use a mark, or not use a mark, because it looks beautiful/ugly, because it's easier/more difficult to write/type/text, because it's available/unavailable in a chosen font, because it takes up more/less space on a page, or simply because we were taught that way (without necessarily knowing why). In particular, the ‘look' of the page can
become a priority in guiding our choices of which punctuation marks to use. This turns out to be a major factor in literary writing.

An aesthetic reason is clearly at the forefront of novelist Cormac McCarthy's mind. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2008, he comments: ‘There's no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks.' And in his most famous novel,
The Road
(2006), we see the result of this view (the extract is from p. 247):

They hurried down the beach against the light. What if the boat washes away? the boy said.

It wont wash away.

It could.

No it wont. Come on. Are you hungry?

Yes.

We're going to eat well tonight. But we need to get a move on.

I'm hurrying, Papa.

And it may rain.

How can you tell?

I can smell it.

Although the reason given for this sparse style is pragmatic – achieving an uncluttered look to the page – it's important to note that the choice is also partly semantic. The style gives an impression of bareness and simplicity, which works well with stories that have primitive, unsophisticated, or apocalyptic themes – and
The Road
is nothing if not apocalyptic.

Authors aren't always the best judges of their own writing when it comes to punctuation. McCarthy says: ‘if you write properly you shouldn't have to punctuate … I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that's it.' But actually, that isn't it. Even in this short extract we see
question marks, line indention, and some use of apostrophes – and in his interview he admits that colons are important, as when introducing a list. Writers do tend to underestimate the extent to which they rely on punctuation, even if they are minimalists.

We also need to note that choices in punctuation have consequences for other areas of language. A minimalist approach has an immediate effect on style. If you choose not to have quotation marks, you have to write in such a way that it's absolutely clear who is speaking. McCarthy knows this, and remarks about those writers who want to follow his style: ‘you really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks to guide people and write in such a way that it's not confusing about who's speaking.' He himself puts in clues, as we see above with ‘the boy said' and ‘Papa'. The extract also illustrates how the conversational turns between participants need to be short, so that the reader doesn't lose track. McCarthy acknowledges: ‘It's important to punctuate so that it makes it easy for people to read.' But to do without marks such as semicolons, sentences also have to be short and structurally simple – as they are in McCarthy's style. As soon as they become complex, with many subordinate clauses, the pressure to add punctuation can't be ignored.

McCarthy admired James Joyce. ‘James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum.' When people say this, they're usually thinking of examples such as the final sequence in
Ulysses
, where Molly Bloom has a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that goes on for over forty pages, and is punctuationless apart from occasional paragraph indention. Here Joyce is more daring than McCarthy, in that he makes no use at all of the apostrophe (he has
Im
for
I'm
as well as such forms as
couldnt
for
couldn't
). A new paragraph begins:

that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the heat I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night …

But note the consequences for Joyce's sentence construction. In stream-of-consciousness, the sense-units being connected (sentences, clauses, phrases) are short and self-contained, enabling us to process it (or, as actors, to read it aloud) chunk by chunk. As soon as Joyce wants to go in for a multi-person dialogue or to develop an idea in a more complex way, this technique no longer works, and punctuation comes back in.

Most of
Ulysses
is punctuated. There are no quotation marks, but a long dash introduces a new speaker. As well as periods and commas, we find question marks, exclamation marks, apostrophes, colons, semicolons, and ellipsis dots. Even in Molly's soliloquy there are initial capitals for names, a few names in italics, forward slashes (as in
1/4
, and in abbreviations such as
6/-
), and an instance of letter substitution (
a--e
for
arse
). The impression of punctuation-lessness comes chiefly from the absence of quotation marks – a technique increasingly used by present-day writers, such as McCarthy, NoViolet Bulawayo (illustrated below), and Cynan Jones in
The Dig
(2014).

These examples illustrate the way creative writers can manipulate punctuation marks for semantic and pragmatic effect. But the success of their writing depends on their awareness of the consequences of these manipulations, otherwise readers won't be able to follow what is going on. If a writer deviates too far from the conventional use of punctuation, the result can be ambiguity or unintelligibility (from a semantic point of view) or inappropriateness or unacceptability (from
a pragmatic point of view). A poet might get away with a lot of rule-breaking – as we will see in the case of E E Cummings (or e e cummings, as later writers, delighting in his penchant for typographical innovation, described him) – but most writing circumstances don't allow a great deal of deviance.