Puerto Rico Needs Your Help! Here's How
United
for Puerto Rico (spearheaded by the First Lady of Puerto Rico)
Former
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efforts in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands
Save the Children, which focuses
specifically on the needs of families and their children.
Global Giving has a $2 million goal for
victims of Hurricane Maria
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"The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid." Edgar Allan Poe
A Brief
History of Punctuation- From thoughtco.com
Where Do Punctuation Marks Come From
and Who Made the Rules?
Updated November 29, 2017
My
attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible.
. . . You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than
anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your
own improvements.
(Ernest Hemingway, letter to Horace Liveright, May 22, 1925)
(Ernest Hemingway, letter to Horace Liveright, May 22, 1925)
Hemingway's attitude toward punctuation sounds eminently sensible: make
sure that you know the rules before you break them.
Sensible, maybe, but not entirely satisfactory. After all,
just who made up these rules (or conventions) in the first place?
Join us as we look for answers in this brief history of
punctuation.
Breathing Room
The beginnings of punctuation lie in classical rhetoric — the art of oratory. Back in ancient Greece and Rome,
when a speech was prepared in writing, marks were used to indicate where — and
for how long — a speaker should pause.
These pauses (and eventually the marks themselves) were
named after the sections they divided. The longest section was called a period, defined by Aristotle as "a
portion of a speech that has in itself a beginning and an end." The
shortest pause was a comma (literally, "that which is cut
off"), and midway between the two was the colon — a "limb,"
"strophe," or "clause."
Marking the Beat
The three marked pauses that were sometimes graded in a
geometric progression, with one "beat" for a comma, two for a colon,
and four for a period.
As W.F. Bolton observes in A Living Language
(1988), "such marks in oratorical 'scripts' began as physical necessities
but needed to coincide with the 'phrasing' of the piece, the demands of
emphasis, and other nuances of elocution."
Almost Pointless
Until the introduction of printing in the late 15th century,
punctuation in English was decidedly unsystematic and at times virtually
absent.
Many of Chaucer's manuscripts, for instance, were punctuated
with nothing more than periods at the end of verse lines, without regard for syntax or sense.
Slash and Double Slash
The favorite mark of England's first printer, William Caxton
(1420-1491), was the forward slash
(also known as the solidus, virgule, oblique, diagonal, and virgula
suspensiva) — forerunner of the modern comma. Some writers of that era
also relied on a double slash (as found today in http://) to signal a
longer pause or the start of a new section of text.
Ben ("Two Pricks") Jonson
One of the first to codify the rules of punctuation in
English was the playwright Ben Jonson — or rather, Ben:Jonson, who included the
colon (he called it the "pause" or "two pricks") in his
signature. In the final chapter of The English Grammar (1640), Jonson
briefly discusses the primary functions of the comma, parenthesis, period, colon, question mark (the
"interrogation"), and exclamation point (the "admiration").
Talking Points
In keeping with the practice (if not always the precepts) of
Ben Jonson, punctuation in the 17th and 18th centuries was increasingly
determined by the rules of syntax rather than the breathing patterns of
speakers.
Nevertheless, this passage from Lindley Murray's
best-selling English Grammar (over 20 million sold) shows that even
at the end of the 18th century punctuation was still treated, in part, as an
oratorical aid:
Punctuation
is the art of dividing a written composition into sentences, or parts of
sentences, by points or stops, for the purpose of marking the different pauses
which the sense, and an accurate pronunciation require.
The Comma represents the shortest pause; the Semicolon, a pause double that of the comma; the Colon, double that of the semicolon; and a period, double that of the colon.
The precise quantity or duration of each pause, cannot be defined; for it varies with the time of the whole. The same composition may be rehearsed in a quicker or a slower time; but the proportion between the pauses should be ever invariable.
(English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, 1795)
The Comma represents the shortest pause; the Semicolon, a pause double that of the comma; the Colon, double that of the semicolon; and a period, double that of the colon.
The precise quantity or duration of each pause, cannot be defined; for it varies with the time of the whole. The same composition may be rehearsed in a quicker or a slower time; but the proportion between the pauses should be ever invariable.
(English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, 1795)
Under Murray's scheme, it appears, a well-placed period
might give readers enough time to pause for a snack.
Writing Points
By the end of the industrious 19th century, grammarians had
come to de-emphasize the elocutionary role of punctuation:
Punctuation
is the art of dividing written discourse into sections by means of points,
for the purpose of showing the grammatical connection and dependence, and
of making the sense more obvious. . . .
It is sometimes stated in works on Rhetoric and Grammar, that the points are for the purpose of elocution, and directions are given to pupils to pause a certain time at each of the stops. It is true that a pause required for elocutionary purposes does sometimes coincide with a grammatical point, and so the one aids the other. Yet it should not be forgotten that the first and main ends of the points is to mark grammatical divisions. Good elocution often requires a pause where there is no break whatever in the grammatical continuity, and where the insertion of a point would make nonsense.
(John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, 1892)
It is sometimes stated in works on Rhetoric and Grammar, that the points are for the purpose of elocution, and directions are given to pupils to pause a certain time at each of the stops. It is true that a pause required for elocutionary purposes does sometimes coincide with a grammatical point, and so the one aids the other. Yet it should not be forgotten that the first and main ends of the points is to mark grammatical divisions. Good elocution often requires a pause where there is no break whatever in the grammatical continuity, and where the insertion of a point would make nonsense.
(John Seely Hart, A Manual of Composition and Rhetoric, 1892)
Final Points
In our own time, the declamatory basis for punctuation has
pretty much given way to the syntactic approach. Also, in keeping with a
century-long trend toward shorter sentences, punctuation is now more lightly
applied than it was in the days of Dickens and Emerson.
Countless style guides spell out the conventions for using the various marks.
Yet when it comes to the finer points (regarding serial commas, for instance), sometimes even
the experts disagree.
Meanwhile, fashions continue to change. In modern prose, dashes are in; semicolons are out. Apostrophes are either sadly neglected or tossed around
like confetti, while quotation marks are seemingly dropped at
random on unsuspecting words.
And so it remains true, as G. V. Carey observed decades ago,
that punctuation is governed "two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal
taste."
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In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” has just been published and will be followed by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:
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