Making a Point (31 page)

The commas and parentheses are in roman type, which is recommended practice – again, on semantic grounds, as
the punctuation is part of the discourse, not the individual words. But the alternatives will nonetheless be seen, especially online, where many writers see no point in spending time and energy making a typeface change that is unlikely to be noticed. And in handwriting, of course, the distinction disappears behind the idiosyncrasies of personal hands.

Different graphic mediums present writers with different options, not all of which are mutually translatable. Italics are difficult to replicate in handwriting, and so alternative means must be found to capture their linguistic functions – usually by means of a straight underline. But handwriting does things that traditional and online printing does not routinely allow, such as multiple underlining in cases of emphasis. Similarly, it is not always possible to equate the typographic features of traditional and electronic printing: hyphenation practices differ, for example, and the kinds of distinction beloved of printers (such as em vs en dashes and small vs large capitals) are generally absent online.

The Internet is a major factor in present-day change. Italic script is slightly less easy to read than roman, and slows reading speed, so long stretches of text in italics tend to be avoided other than in special circumstances (such as an extended stage direction in a play script). But even short pieces of text can be affected on the computer screen, where resolution is lower. Boldface or colour is more visible, so we often see these features replacing items that in traditional publishing would be in italics. And we also see the italic convention dispensed with altogether. ‘HMS Renown' and ‘primula vulgaris' are likely to appear online with no italics at all. The electronic world is making us rethink several traditional practices in relation to punctuation, and offering fresh opportunities.

33

Punctuating the Internet

A brave new world that has no punctuation in it? That is the myth which developed in the early days of electronic communication, when people saw emails and chatroom exchanges lacking standard punctuation – and sometimes with no punctuation at all. But it has turned out to be only a fraction of the story.

To begin with, alongside punctuation minimalism, there is punctuation maximalism, where we see more marks than would be found in traditional handwriting or printing. The trend is facilitated by keyboard technology: simply by holding a key (other than a letter or numeral) down, we can generate an indefinite string of symbols, thus allowing exchanges such as:

will we see you at the party???????

yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is not the first time repeated symbols have been used in English – they were always an option in informal letter-writing – but they have never been used so extensively. And the practice extends idiosyncratically to symbols that were never used in sequence before, such as >>>>>>>> and ((((((((((. The meaning of such sequences only becomes clear by looking at the context – and not always then.

The minimalist trend has its predecessors too, as we saw in earlier chapters with such writers as Cormac McCarthy
(
Chapter 11
), and of course the earliest English writing was most minimalist of all, with its almost total lack of punctuation marking. What Internet users have done, largely by instinct, is make a connection with writing in its most primitive state. They've been able to do it because, for the first time since the Middle Ages, they have available a medium which allows writing to appear in the public domain without the intervention of the cadre of professionals whose job it is to maintain consistency in Standard English – editors, copy-editors, and proof-readers. When writing a blog online, nobody is looking over your shoulder.

For punctuation, the scenario is unprecedented and can be unnerving, as Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon observe in their influential
Wired Style
(1999):

If you're writing on or about the Net, prepare for a clash of cultures – between copy editors and coders. The first live by the book, faithful to every mechanical rule; the second live by the keyboard, wildly appropriating every punctuation symbol in ASCII. Online, publishing meets programming – and punctuation leads a double life.

The situation is no longer as dramatic as Hale and Scanlon suggest. They were writing in the late 90s, when the Internet was still a novelty to most people, and all kinds of weird practices were being experimented with as users struggled to come to terms with what the technology was allowing them to do. Things have settled down a lot since then. Apart from anything else, the online demographic has risen sharply. It's no longer solely a young person's medium. And as the average age of users rises, so conservative linguistic practices become more evident.

The arrival of the Internet is not the end of punctuation as we know it. Rather, as Hale and Scanlon suggest, we live
in two punctuation worlds now – one standard, the other nonstandard. The situation parallels what we see in the more general linguistic scenario that sociolinguists call
diglossia
(the simultaneous use in a society of a language that has two contrasting varieties, such as Classical Arabic and colloquial Arabic) – only here we would need to call it
digraphia
. In the offline world, Standard English punctuation is still alive and well; in the online world, nonstandard punctuation is alive and well. But the situation is mixed, for only certain genres of online writing display the wildness Hale and Scanlon observed. Quite a few online sites – most of the Web, and many bloggers and social networkers – remain faithful to traditional punctuation norms.

The essential first step, in the modern management of punctuation, is to understand what's going on in those genres where nonstandard punctuation is the default practice. For a young learner (and for older users too) the challenge is not to mix the two worlds up. The media panic is that new punctuation habits learned in the online nonstandard world will transfer to the offline standard one. For teachers, the challenge is to draw their students' attention to the stylistic differences between standard and nonstandard usage. And for this to happen, a grasp of what is taking place online is a necessary first step.

The foundation of this understanding comes from the perspectives I introduced earlier in this book. The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is crucial. As my earlier chapters illustrated, punctuation is only occasionally semantically necessary: there are very few occasions –
pace
St Augustine and Lynne Truss – when a punctuation mark is essential to expressing a meaning.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
works well as a joke precisely because it is so rare. And examples such as
its
and
it's
are persuasive only when viewed in isolation
– something that never happens in real life. There can never really be confusion between
it's
and
its
, because they never occur in the same part of a sentence – one being a possessive pronoun, used before a noun (as in
the tree has shed its leaves
) and the other being a subject+verb (as in
it's very interesting
).

There are few semantic grounds for valuing punctuation. But there are unassailable pragmatic grounds. Punctuation is, firstly, a recognized feature of Standard English. It isn't the most important feature: that accolade belongs to spelling, because
every
word has to be spelled acceptably, whereas punctuation by its nature is sporadic. It is, however, far more noticeable than nonstandard grammatical constructions (
ain't
,
I was sat
,
haven't got nothing
, etc) as these turn up relatively infrequently compared to punctuation marks. As a result, if writers punctuate badly in settings where standard English is expected, and make a mistake in such words as
its
, the errors are likely to be noticed, and the perpetrator judged accordingly.

But punctuation is important for more than just reasons of social expectation and acceptability. It has proved to be valuable in aiding swift comprehension, especially as texts have become longer, more complex, and more varied over the centuries. It helps writers to organize their thoughts on the page, and it helps readers to process continuous text with a minimum of discomfort. While it's possible to read a piece of text without any punctuation at all and still understand it without ambiguity – as we saw at the very beginning of this book – such a task is undeniably more difficult. You can prove this to yourself quite easily, replicating the kind of study done in readability research. Take a paragraph; omit all punctuation; and monitor yourself (or someone else) reading it. Then do the same with the punctuated text. There will be more pauses and false starts in the unpunctuated text. Your
eye-movements will dart about, as you look ahead for cues that would normally be found in the punctuation. You will understand the text well enough, but it's likely to have been an uncomfortable experience, and later you will have greater difficulty remembering what it was about.

This kind of exercise is illuminating only if the texts are of some length. Omitting punctuation in a short text presents few if any problems. After all, we see this every day of our lives in street signs, notices, posters, and many other settings. There's no punctuation after the words GIVE WAY or STOP WHEN LIGHTS ARE RED. And most titles of books aren't punctuated, even if they are long, such as
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
or
The High Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake
. So we might expect online users to be most ready to dispense with standard punctuation in genres where messages are short, such as texting, Twitter, instant messaging, brief emails, and chatroom or forum exchanges. Which is exactly what we find.

But dispensing with standard punctuation doesn't mean using no punctuation at all, even though this does sometimes happen. There's usually some sort of punctuation present. And quite intricate uses have developed, a few of which I've mentioned in earlier chapters, such as the use of ellipsis dots (…) to show incompleteness on Twitter, or the omission of a final period or the use of an exclamation mark to convey warmth and rapport. URL domain names have their own punctuation ‘grammar'. They disallow spaces between words: a sequence needs to be linked using hyphens (
www.this-is-my-site.com
). Dots can only appear as component separators. Domain names are also case-insensitive:
this-ismy-site
and
THIS-IS-MY-SITE
would point to the same place. A further option, avoiding hyphens, is to use camel-case, as in
ThisIsMySite
.

The
asterisk
is another mark that has developed a little system of its own. In traditional publishing, it started life as a footnote marker, then came to be used as a mark of letter omission, as noted by Lindley Murray, and as a section separator in novels. In the nineteenth century it competed with the long dash as a way of hiding a sensitive word, or a part of a word (d***, d**n) – a practice that had become so common, by the end of the fastidious Victorian era, that it attracted the attention of Mr Punch, who in his issue of 15 December 1909 commented on ‘an improvement in trade':

The type-founders are now working overtime making asterisks in order to cope with the huge demand which has sprung up since the action of the Libraries in regard to a certain type of fiction.

If he were still around today, he would doubtless have had much more to say about the proliferation of asterisks in Internet settings, where they can mark a semantic comment (*sigh*) or emphasis (‘there was a *third* man'). In fact, asterisk semantics is even more subtle, as it allows two degrees of intensity:

I said *don't do it*

I said *don't* *do* *it*

And he would doubtless have been even more scathing about the terminological profusion that surrounds the symbol:
star
,
splat
,
wildcard
,
dingle
,
spider
,
aster
,
twinkle
…

The other really noticeable Internet mark is the
slash
– another term that attracts alternative names, such as
slant
,
solidus
,
virgule
,
diagonal
, and
oblique
. The mark is widely used in offline contexts, such as:

• a substitute for
  or
  : ‘he/she', ‘hot/cold'
  
• a substitute for
  and
  : ‘the Smith/Brown review', ‘2005/6'
  
• a mark of abbreviation: ‘w/o' [=without], ‘c/o' [care of]
  
• a separator in dates: '1/1/16' [=1 January 2016]
  

In more specialized contexts we see it, for example:

• in literature, marking a line-break in a poem or play: ‘Double, double toil and trouble: / Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble'
  
• in mathematics, showing a fraction or division: 1/3
  
• in linguistics, showing a sound-unit to be a phoneme: /t/
  
• in transcribing a conversation, to show where one person's speech overlaps with another:
  

  A So I really think he should / try a different
  

  B He ought to, you know
  

Usually, slashes have no spaces on either side; but some style guides recommend them to aid visual clarity, especially when separating compound words or a long sequence of items:

New York/Los Angeles

New York / Los Angeles

the verbs
ask
/
say
/
reply
/
declare
/
suggest
form a class …

the verbs
ask
/
say
/
reply
/
declare
/
suggest
form a class …

That's the situation in the offline world. What's happening online?

The Internet has added something new: there are now two kinds of slash – forward and (since the 1980s) backward (
backslash
). The latter arose within various programming languages, and is most often encountered in everyday computer use as a component separator in a Windows file path (
C:\ File\DC
). It has had relatively little use outside technical contexts, though it's sometimes seen in chat exchanges or online
games, where it marks an emotion, action, or reaction, such as
\faints
or
\join
. Forward slashes are far more common in these functions, though – so much so that when someone is reading a command or address aloud, the adjective
forward
is often omitted, and we hear a string such as ‘original pronunciation dot com slash analysis'.

Forward slashes are universal in URL addresses, the norm for commands in games, and present in the file paths on Mac and Unix systems. The
vertical bar
(or
pipe
, |), part of the standard keyboard, adds a further option as a separator.

Several other orthographic conventions have emerged on the Internet, some of which have their origins in traditional publishing. For example:

• S P A C I N G shows that something is ‘loud and clear'
  
• CAPITALS convey a ‘shouting' tone of voice
  
• _underbars_ (or _underscores_), mark emphasis and general highlighting, and offer an alternative to italics or colour in titles : _The English Language_
  
• add a semantic commentary on what has just been said: ,
  

Usage varies among Internet genres, online groups, and individual users. But everyone who emails uses the @ sign – the locator symbol chosen by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 because it was a symbol that wasn't being used in names or in computer programming, and yet was already familiar from commercial settings. As a symbol with independent meaning (= ‘at'), it lives on the edge of the punctuation system, but its function is similar: it both links (two elements in an address) and separates. And this is the reason any book on punctuation should mention other symbols that perform these roles.