Making a Point (12 page)

13

Is there a punctuation system?

Some punctuation marks are more important than others, either because they mark a major pause or because they show a major grammatical break. This means that punctuation is a hierarchy, in which some visual features identify the largest units of writing and others identify smaller ones. And it's a hierarchy that exists regardless of whether you see punctuation as primarily a representation of speech or of grammar.

It seems an obvious point, yet this principle is not apparent in the way the grammarians, printers, and editors of earlier centuries introduced the subject. We would expect the most important orthographic features to have been dealt with first, in their expositions. That's certainly how present-day teachers work, when teaching young children to write. They want them to ‘write in sentences', and that means, first and foremost, learning to use full stops, or periods. Here's an illustration, from a four-book series called
Punctuation
, by F W Ledgard, published in 1977, aimed at students from age eleven upwards. The opening chapter of Book 1 is called ‘Full Stop', and it begins:

Reading is like driving a car or riding a bicycle. For some of the time you go smoothly along but every now and then you have to stop. When you are driving or cycling, you have a STOP sign or red traffic light to make sure you stop at the end of a road and don't have an accident. These are the most important of all road signs.

In reading you have a stop sign as well. It is called the FULL STOP (.) and there must be one at the end of every sentence. Of all punctuation marks it is the most important. Whenever you see one, you must stop. If you take no notice of the full stop and go straight on, you will have an accident with your reading just as you would with a car or a bicycle.

The advice isn't perfect, as full stops are not the only punctuation marks used at the ends of sentences, but the emphasis is correct. Full stops are crucial for coherent reading and writing. They are ‘the most important'.

It is an emphasis we don't find in the early writers. As I mentioned at the end of
Chapter 10
, everyone began their accounts with the comma, then went on to the semicolon and colon, and ended with the full stop. I have found no exceptions. The authors seem to have been instinctively following the long-standing tradition I described earlier of moving from the shortest pause to the longest, reinforced by the feeling that, because there were more problems to be dealt with relating to the use of the comma, these should be handled first. We see the back-to-front presentation even in the simplest accounts, such as
The Good Child's Book of Stops
(p. 86), where the period isn't even given a separate section, but lumped together with the colon for poetic reasons. Nobody was ever going to get a good sense of punctuation as a system of marks that way.

System
is the operative word here, as it always is in linguistic description. In pronunciation, we talk about the ‘vowel system' or the ‘intonation system'; in grammar we talk about the ‘tense system' or the ‘pronoun system'. What does this mean? It means there is a choice to be made. Within a system, the language provides us with a set of options from which we choose whenever we say or write something. If I decide to use a personal pronoun at the beginning of my sentence, I
have a seven-way choice:
I
,
you
,
he
,
she
,
it
,
we
,
they
. I could start the following sentence with any of them:

--- fell down.

Notice that we use only one member of the system at a time, at any one place in the discourse. We say
I fell down
,
You fell down
, and so on. If I opt for
he
, I immediately ‘tell' my listener that I'm not talking about
I
,
you
,
she
,
it
,
we
,
they
. If I opt for
they
, I exclude all the other possibilities. And the same point applies even if I join two pronouns together:
You and I
contrasts with
You and he
or
He and she
.

Some systems, such as pronouns, have several members. Some have just two. Consider modern English nouns, which operate with a number system. We have a choice between just two members: singular and plural –
horse
vs
horses
. The meaning is ‘one' vs ‘more than one'. The two meanings define each other. Just as with pronouns, to choose one of the members excludes the other. This is a crucial principle, when we start thinking about punctuation, because – despite its apparently chaotic character – this is a system too.

When we talk about punctuation as a system, we mean that, at any one place in a written discourse, a choice has to be made from the set of options the language makes available. As with grammar, the marks define each other. And as with grammar, choosing one of the members excludes the others. So the important thing – the really important thing – is to be aware of what the options are, at any place in the discourse as we read or write. What options are available to us at the top level in the punctuation hierarchy? What options are available at lower levels?

This way of looking at punctuation isn't just abstract reasoning. It reflects everyday practice. Faced with the task of writing a sentence, the decision has to be made: how shall
I punctuate it? At the end of the sentence, what options are available to me? At the beginning, what options are available to me? In the middle, what options are available to me? And what options are available, faced with a blank page, on paper or screen, before I start writing anything at all?

The blank page. This is the real starting point. And it's something that was ignored by the early grammarians. The manuscript writers of antiquity recognized its importance, as we saw earlier, but – presumably because it was so obvious – it was taken for granted in the age of print. And yet this is the first thing to be decided. It is the topmost level of the hierarchy. If I am writing, where do I start on the page, and what are my options, as I put pen to paper or finger to keyboard? If I am reading, where do I look first, and what options has the writer used to guide me through the text?

14

Starting at the top

Within a continuous piece of writing, or
text
– whether it be a book, a chapter, an essay, a newspaper report, a letter, a sign-post, an email, a blog … – two things immediately stand out: the individual words, and the blocks of writing into which the text is organized. Space is the defining factor that gives each its identity. Words, identified by the spaces that surround them, are at the bottom of the punctuation hierarchy, and I'll discuss issues to do with their identification later. At the top of the hierarchy are the linguistic units that stand out because of the way they've been placed against the white space of the page or screen. These raise issues of punctuation that go above and beyond the level of the individual sentence.

What are these units? They are the elements that convey the semantic organization of a text, such as title, subtitle, chapter heading, subheading, headline, running head, footnote, caption, page number, address, signature, and of course the body copy of the text. From a pragmatic point of view, they convey the writer's opinion as to the importance and relevance of the element in the text as a whole. In some texts, such as a school essay, the organization may be minimal, displaying little more than a heading and body copy, along with its paragraphing. In others, such as a retail website, there may be a complex visual organization in which multiple elements compete for attention. At this point we enter the domain of graphic design, which deals with issues (such as
layout, choice of font, and the use of colour) that go well beyond the subject of this book.

But in all cases, the question has to be addressed: to punctuate or not to punctuate? If a writer wishes to draw the attention of a reader to a particular part of a text, how is this to be done? Is punctuation to be used, or will other features perform the same role? Fashions change, in this respect. In earlier printed texts, title pages were often heavily punctuated, as we see with
Wit and Mirth
(1719).

The title on the front page of the first English newspaper (1665) is also end-pointed. And running heads in books (such as the one at the top of this page) were routinely ended with a period until the twentieth century. These are all seen as archaic practices today, where the stylistic fashion is to have elements of this kind look as uncluttered as possible. We rarely (never?) see a period in a title or heading today.

But the issue of whether to punctuate remains a live option. For example, in 2014, an author and a copy-editor had an exchange over whether to use a colon in chapter headings that were all of the following kind:

From
mint
to
dosh
: words for money

This is how the heading appears in the Contents. But in the chapter itself, there is a new layout and typography which made the colon redundant:

From
mint
to
dosh

WORDS FOR MONEY

The author (me, in this case) accepted the design decision, though he continued to feel that the semantic dependence of
the two parts of the heading would have been reinforced by the use of the colon.

We are so used to reading the punctuational conventions of our own time that it's easy to forget that these are just that – conventions – and that they have to be learned. Children have to learn them when they first engage with literacy. When writing, they have to decide on the location of their written language on the page (leaving margins at the head, foot, and sides), and whether to punctuate it. In reading, they have to evaluate the significance of what other writers have done. They will tend to copy what they've seen in their reading books, but a common early practice is to add marks all over the place. Having noticed punctuation – or having had their attention drawn to it by a parent or teacher – they use it ubiquitously, until the overuse is pointed out. I recall one youngster (age about seven) who put a full stop at the end of every line of his story, regardless of sense. Another who put one between each word of the story title. Yet another had a fascination with semicolons. When I asked her why she used them so much, she replied that she liked the size and that they were pretty. And when I suggested that a full stop was the normal way of ending a sentence, she looked very dubious, and observed that if you wanted to show something had come to an end, then surely the bigger the better?

A historical perspective is always useful when it comes to understanding a present-day punctuation practice. Virtually all the issues (the obvious exception is the Internet) have been identified and debated in earlier times, and it's well worth reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the decisions made by these writers in order to see why some conventions were dropped and why others have continued in use. Although general issues to do with the overall semantic and pragmatic organization of a text were rarely explicitly
discussed by writers on punctuation coming from the elocution or grammatical traditions, they were very much in the mind of writers in antiquity.

As we saw in
Chapter 3
, in the discussion of old manuscripts, there were several ways of marking a new section in a piece of writing. The first letter of the opening word might be enlarged, coloured, or decorated. A special mark might be placed in the margin, such as an ivy-leaf or diple (>). In later manuscripts, we see a specific paragraph mark, or paraph, ¶, and this was taken over by printers as the
pilcrow
. Anyone who reads the sixteenth-century
Book of Common Prayer
will see it used to mark significant changes in the discourse, such as:

¶
Then shall the Priest saye
.

Present-day liturgical texts often continue the practice, such as identifying a change of speaker in a dialogue exchange:

¶
Minister
. Lord hear our prayers.

¶
Answer
. And let our cry come unto thee.

We also see the pilcrow in documents with sequentially numbered paragraphs, such as often appear in legal and academic texts. And it has entered the electronic age. The pilcrow doesn't have a presence on keyboards (though it can be found in any list of Special Symbols), reflecting the way it has gone out of general use. But it's still there in Microsoft Word and some other text management systems as a hidden symbol showing a carriage return.

The pilcrow may not be in everyday use, but the linguistic feature it represented is still as important a feature of written language as it ever was: the semantic division of a text into sections. It's important to note that – notwithstanding the word's etymology – we are here talking about sections, not
paragraphs. A section might be a single paragraph, but more often it includes a series. In
The Book of Common Prayer
, the pilcrowed headings are often followed by several paragraphs. In a modern novel, a section can include an indefinite number of paragraphs running over several pages.

Section-breaks show the way writers have organized their text into semantic units. We often see them within the chapters of a book, representing a thematic shift that's greater than the one that motivates a new paragraph, but not so great that it motivates a new chapter. It can mark a scene-change, a new character, an alternative time frame, or any general shift of narrative perspective. Here's an example from the opening lines of a novel (Hilary Crystal's
The Memors
, 2013):

On Saturday the twelfth of June, three things happened to Mikey, aged four years and two months. Two good things and one bad thing.

The two good things. He put his wellington boots on all by himself, on the right feet, for the first time. He went to the park with his Mum and his sister, and learned how to make a swing go all by himself.

And the bad thing? Something frightened him, and he didn't know what it was. But the really bad bit was afterwards, when he was scared because he couldn't remember, and couldn't remember why he was scared.

He wasn't the only one.

***

Bob Holpweed tucked the local newspaper under his arm and went to the park. …

Here the section-break introduces a new character and a new series of events. If it were not there, it would seem as if Bob
Holpweed was part of the first topic, and was scared like Mikey, which is certainly not the case.

Because section-breaks are important semantically, they need to be clearly identified. So, if we decide to use them, what punctuational options are available to us? The simplest way is to introduce a larger amount of white space than would normally be used between paragraphs. It would be possible to print the above example as follows:

… because he couldn't remember, and couldn't remember why he was scared.

He wasn't the only one.

Bob Holpweed tucked the local newspaper under his arm and went to the park. …

The problem with extra white space, though, is that it's invisible in certain locations. If a section happened to end at the bottom of a page, the contrast between section-break and paragraph-ending would disappear. Spacing is also of less value when paragraphs have no indention and are separated by a line of white space, as in the following kind of setting. With two degrees of white space, the contrast is not so easy to see.

On Saturday the twelfth of June, three things happened to Mikey, aged four years and two months. Two good things and one bad thing.

The two good things. He put his wellington boots on all by himself, on the right feet, for the first time. He went to the park with his Mum and his sister, and learned how to make a swing go all by himself.

And the bad thing? Something frightened him, and he didn't know what it was. But the really bad bit was
afterwards, when he was scared because he couldn't remember, and couldn't remember why he was scared.

He wasn't the only one.

Bob Holpweed tucked the local newspaper under his arm and went to the park. …

This is an unusual setting for novels, but it's commonplace these days in letters, business reports, web pages, and many kinds of official document.

The problem of white-space ambiguity is solved by the introduction of a punctuation mark of some kind.
The Memors
uses triple asterisks (called a
dinkus
), with extra space above and below. In other texts we may see single asterisks, longer sequences of asterisks, three asterisks placed in a triangle (
, called an
asterism
– there's an example on p. 131), a sequence of dots or dashes, a horizontal rule, or some ornamental symbol such as a stylized form of a leaf (such as
, the hedera of old manuscripts, now called a
fleuron
). A wide range of characters can provide a section-spacing function, easily visible online under the heading of
dingbats
– a term whose origin is obscure, but which has similarities to words invented to describe entities that have no obvious name (like
dingus
,
doobery
,
thingummy
). They include geometrical shapes with variable ornamentation, such as stars, crosses, diamonds, squares, and circles. Choosing a dingbat may involve pragmatic considerations, as some of the symbols (such as a cross) can convey a cultural meaning that the writer may not intend.