Making a Point (34 page)

Make the task more appealing

This is definitely the teacher's domain, but authors have made a contribution too, by incorporating punctuation terms into their fiction. The ability to talk about language is known to be a critical element in the development of literacy, so anything that fosters this awareness in relation to punctuation is likely to be helpful, such as anthropomorphic or zoomorphic stories about how punctuation marks behave. Here are three:

• ‘The comma that didn't belong anywhere', a short story by American writer Martha Baird, and filmed by Ken Kimmelman in 2009 as
  Thomas Comma
  – the adventure of a lonely comma looking for the right sentence.
  
• In the Land of Punctuation
  (an illustrated translation of the comic poem by German writer Christian Morgenstern written in 1905). It begins (in Sirish Rao's version):
  

  The peaceful land of Punctuation
  

  is filled with tension overnight
  

  When the stops and commas of the nation
  

  call the semicolons ‘parasites'.
  

  (It's quite a violent story!)
  

• Punctuation Bestiary
  , by American writer Kiran Spees. We see the two ears of a pair of rabbits morph into quotation marks … a frog's long tongue turns into a dash …
  

Punctuation can be fun: that is the message of books like these. And there is no limit to the games that can be devised to put this principle into practice. Authors such as Cummings and Joyce show us various ways of playing with punctuation (
Chapter 30
). Percival Leigh rewrote famous texts – ‘taking liberties' with punctuation, as he put it (
Chapter 11
). Thanks to YouTube, even quite young students can watch (and adapt) Danish comedian Victor Borge's famous sketch in which he gives a distinctive noise to every punctuation mark and reads out passages, with hilarious results. And there are endless opportunities to replicate the way artists use punctuation in comics and cartoons, where the marks can replace whole sentences and convey reactions in the manner of emoticons. Charles Schulz was a master of this technique. Here are four of his strips from a September 1964 punctuation sequence:

Become an MP

Teachers have to show their students how to
manage
punctuation, which means not just getting their charges to read a lot, but guiding them towards an informed awareness of the nature of the system and of the stylistic differences that exist. A good linguistically based grounding in punctuation should give students a solid understanding of what the rules are – remembering, as Kurt Vonnegut said (
Chapter 22
), ‘Rules only take us so far' – and an appreciation of the problems to be faced when applying them. It should draw attention to the strengths and limitations of the system as a whole. The ultimate aim is to nurture the ability to ‘translate' from one genre to the other as occasion demands, thereby fostering a mature and confident control of punctuational styles. We all need to become MPs – ‘masters of punctuation'.

References and further reading

Chapters 1–10

Blake, N F.
Caxton's Own Prose
. London: André Deutsch, 1973.

Crystal, D.
Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices
. London: British Library, 2010.

Crystal, D.
The Stories of English
. London: Penguin, 2004.

Parkes, M B.
Pause and Effect: An Introduction to Punctuation in the West
. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992.

Roberts, J.
Guide to Scripts Used in English Writing up to 1500
. London: British Library, 2005.

Saenger, P.
Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading
. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Chapters 11–12

Crystal, D.
Making Sense of Grammar
. London: Penguin, 2004.

Sutherland, K.
Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts: A Digital Edition
. Available at
http://www.janeausten.ac.uk
.

Sutherland, K.
Jane Austen's Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Chapters 13–34

Barfoot, C. ‘Trouble with the apostrophe: or, you know what hairdresser's are like', in I Tieken-Boon van Ostade and J Frankis (eds),
Language Usage and Description: Studies Presented to N E Osselton on the Occasion of his Retirement
. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991, 121–39.

Baron, N and Ling, R. ‘Necessary smileys & useless periods'.
Visible Language
45 (1/2), 2011, 45–67.

Carey, G V.
Mind the Stop
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939; London: Penguin Books 1971).

Crystal, D.
The Fight for English
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Crystal, D. ‘On a not very bright grammar test'. 12 September 2013 at <
http://david-crystal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/on-not-very-bright-grammar-test.html
>

Deck, J and Herson, B.
The Great Typo Hunt
. New York: Crown.

Fowler, H W.
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
(1926), edited by D Crystal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Gowers, E.
Plain Words
(1948), revised and updated by R Gowers. London: Penguin, 2014.

Hale, C and Scanlon, J.
Wired Style
. New York: Broadway Books, 1999.

Houston, K.
Shady Characters
. London: Penguin, 2013.

Kay, C, Roberts, J, Samuels, M and Wotherspoon, I.
The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Ledgard, F W.
Punctuation
. London: Cassell, 1977.

Mackay, D and Simo, J.
Help Your Child to Read and Write, and More
. London: Penguin, 1976.

Miller, G A. ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information', in G A Miller,
The Psychology of Communication
. Baltimore. MD: Penguin, 1967, 14–44.

Partridge, E.
You Have a Point There
. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953.

Quirk, R, Greenbaum, S, Leech, G and Svartvik, J.
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language
. London: Longman, 1985.

Strunk, W and White, E B.
The Elements of Style
. Original edition by Strunk, 1918. Joint revised edition, New York: Macmillan, 1959.

Toner, A (ed.).
Punctuation
. A special issue of
Visible Language
45 (1/2), 2011.

Truss, L.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
. London: Profile Books, 2003.

Appendix

Baird, B. ‘The comma that didn't belong anywhere', filmed by Ken Kimmelman as
Thomas Comma
. New York: Imagery Film Ltd, 2009.

Downing, J, Ayers, D and Schaefer, B.
Linguistic Awareness in Reading Readiness
. Windsor: NFER-Nelson, 1983.

Ferreiro, E and Teberosky, A.
Literacy before Schooling
. London: Heinemann, 1983.

Morgenstern, C.
In the Land of Punctuation
(
Im Reich der Interpunktionen
, 1905), illustrated by Rathna Ramanathan, translated by Sirish Rao. Chennai: Tara Books, 2009.

Sing, S and Hall, N. ‘Listening to children think about punctuation', in A Carter, T Lillis and S Perkin (eds),
Why Writing Matters
. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2009, 189–203.

Spees, K.
Punctuation Bestiary
. Seattle, WA: Excite Kids, 2011.

User Design.
Punctuation …?
<
www.userdesign.co.uk/books
>,2012.

Illustration credits

Alamy
349
; Ashmolean Museum,
2
; Author's photographs
xii
,
350
; British Library
4
,
12
,
19
,
26
,
34
,
86
,
98
,
112
,
194
,
320
; Charles Schultz estate
360
; Oxford Gazette
113
;
Punch
131
,
133
,
156
,
156
,
258
,
273
; Second Aeon Publications
200

While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders of illustrations, the author and publishers would be grateful for information about any illustrations where they have been unable to trace them, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions.

Index

A

abbreviations
137

acute accent
82

address punctuation
90

admiration
see
exclamation mark

adverbials

and commas
244
–
9

and hyphens
268
–
9

advertisements
170
–
71

Ælfric
11
–
12
,
25
,
140

aerated script
9

aesthetic factors
91
–
2
,
138
,
309
,
325

air quotes
313

Alcuin
24

Alford, Henry
72
–
3
,
80
,
177
,
343

Alfred, King
1
,
17

Alfred Jewel
1
–
2

Ambrose, St
7

American vs British English
134
,
165
,
207
,
226
,
262
,
269
,
295
,
302
,
307
,
309
,
311
,
335
–
6

anaphora
231

Anderson, James Byron
214

angle brackets
303
,
334

anonymity
154

Anthony, Piers
339

aposiopesis
154

apostrophe
275
–
94
,
318

early uses
51
,
82
,
277
–
81

first recorded use
37

greengrocers
283
–
4
,
342

hunt
275
–
6
,
290

in business
285
–
8

marking elision
277
–
9

marking plural
279
,
283

marking possession
279
–
82
,
285

not related to
his
278

omission
93
–
4

spacing
80

vs quotation marks
309
–
10

Apostrophe Protection Society
xiii
,
276
,
290

Aristotle
5

asterisk
82
–
3
,
118

Internet use
332

triple
118

vs dash
332

asterism
118

Augustine, St
7
,
12
–
14
,
89
,
329

Austen, Jane
97
–
102
,
144
,
154

B

backslash
333
–
4

Baird, Martha
359

Barfoot, Cedric
286

Baron, Naomi
173
–
4

Bazin, Hervé
339

Beale, John
52

Beckett, Samuel
140

Bede
17
,
19

Benbow, John
261

Benedict, St
23
–
4

bibliographies
224
,
258

Bierce, Andrew
339

Billings, Josh
340

Blake, Norman
33

Block, Giles
40

block quotation
315

Bodley, Thomas
53

bold type
132
,
319
–
20
,
326

Book of Common Prayer, The
115
–
16
,
278

Boot, Jesse
287

Borge, Victor
360

brace
82
,
302
–
3

bracket

first use
37

nesting
297

round
295
–
306

square
82
,
297
–
8
,
302

types
302
–
3

Bradley, Henry
101

breve
82

British English usage
see
American vs British English

Brontë, Charlotte
69

Brook, Peter
40

Brown, Goold
176
,
283

Browne, John
194

Bulawayo, NoViolet
94
,
96
,
315

bullets
129
–
30
,
148

Bullokar, William
50

Burton, Virginia Lee
128
–
9

Butcher, Judith
254

Byron, Lord
69

C

Caesar, Julius
229
,
232

camel case
8
,
331

capitalization
131
–
2
,
195
,
225
,
318
–
20
,
334

capitulum
27

caret
82
,
335

Caretaker, The
159
–
60

Carey, G V
255
,
347

Cawdrey, Robert
54

Caxton, William
32
–
6
,
67

Chapman, R W
101
–
2

Charlemagne
24

chevrons
303

child point of view
357
–
9

choice
87
–
8
,
108
–
9
,
141
–
3
,
354
–
5

Christie, Agatha
161
,
166

Churchill, Winston
232

Cicero
5
,
20

circumflex
82

Cobbett, William
144
–
5
,
227
,
236
,
276
–
7
,
344
,
346

colash
219

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
67

colon
216
–
26

double
223
,
339

early uses
46
,
51
,
100

first recorded use
37

followed by capital
225

frequency
228

in headings
113
–
14
,
133

one per sentence
222

vs comma
226
,
233

vs hyphen
101
–
2

vs period
220
–
23

vs semicolon
58
–
9
,
207
,
218
,
220
–
22

with dash
219

Colter, Mary
275

comma
227
–
58

disputed
76
–
7

early uses
46
,
51

ending a sentence
312

first recorded use
37

frequency
228

given priority
84

length factors
236
–
9
,
244
–
9

omission
234
–
5

overused
72

Oxford/serial
60
–
61
,
250
–
58

separating decimals
136
,
258

splice
204
,
229
,
353
–
4

vs colon
226
,
233

vs dash
148
–
9
,
235

vs parentheses
298
–
300

vs period
233

vs semicolon
203
–
6
,
230
–
33

with adverbials
244
–
9

command (in grammar)
142
,
182
,
190

commash
219

compositors
75
–
6
,
79
–
80

compounds and hyphens
261
–
71

Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, A
134
,
228

concrete poetry
200

consistency
138
,
356
–
7

continuation dots
158

copy-editors/correctors
71
,
263
,
328

correlatives
148
,
258
,
295
–
316

Cotgrave, Randle
176

Crair, Ben
172
–
3

crotchet
82
,
302

Crystal, Hilary
116
–
18

Cummings, E E
95
,
305
–
6
,
347
,
355
,
360

Cunningham, William
278

D

dagger
335

Dahl, Roald
355

dash
37
,
94
,
144
–
56
,
178
,
206
–
7

frequency
228

in Jane Austen
100

long
151

swung
147
–
8

vs asterisk
332

vs comma
148
–
9
,
235
,
245

vs hyphen
145
–
7

vs parentheses
148
–
50
,
298
–
9

vs quotation marks
151
,
315

with colon
219

Davies, Evan R
103

Davison, Peter
209

Davy, Humphry
67
–
8

Day, John
278

Deck, Jeff
294
–
5

Defoe, Daniel
102
–
3

Denham, Henry
194

de Quincey, Thomas
59

detective stories
161

Dexter, Timothy
340
–
41

diastole
21
,
22

Dickens, Charles
59
,
139
,
202
,
204
–
6

Dickinson, Emily
106
,
144

dictionaries
54
,
128
,
148
,
270
,
301

dieresis
45
,
82

diglossia/digraphia
329

dingbats
118
,
130

dinkus
118

diple
15
,
115
,
308

direct speech
224
–
5
,
307
–
16
,
324

domain names
see
Internet Donne, John
202

dot
136
,
331

Downing, John
357

drop capital
131

Dryden, John
68

E

Eats, Shoots and Leaves
ix
,
xiii
,
13
,
47
,
89
,
329
,
342

eccentricity
340
–
41

editorial emendations
100
–
101

electronic communication
161
–
2
,
171
–
5
,
291
–
2
,
303
–
4
,
326
,
327
–
39

Eliot, T S
169
,
323

ellipsis dots
82
,
157
–
66
,
206
,
245
,
331

extended
162
–
3

spacing
163
–
5

elocution
61
–
4

email
127
,
212
,
291
–
2
,
327
,
334

em dash
80
,
145
,
153

emoji
338

emoticon
174
–
5
,
212
,
223
,
336
–
8

en dash
145
,
270

Eusebius
17

exclamation (in grammar)
142

exclamation mark/point
176
–
86
,
350

adapted
339

early uses
26
,
43
,
51

frequency
228

gender differences
179

in Internet
179
–
81
,
331

in names
184
–
5

inverted
187

overused
72
–
3
,
177
,
182

vs question mark
186
,
193
–
4

Expert Orthographist, The
89

F

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
169

Ferreiro, Emilia
357

Finch, Peter
200

finger quotes
313

First Folio
39
–
43
,
153
,
194
,
216
–
17
,
261
,
279
,
299
–
300
,
308
,
324

Fitzgerald, F Scott
177
,
184

fleuron
118

floating hyphen
270

fonts
119
,
132
,
135
,
197
,
319