Making a Point (13 page)

Ornamental marks of this kind raise more general pragmatic issues. They are evidently felt to be appropriate for artistic texts, for we see many such symbols in novels, short
stories, and poems. We also see them in nonfiction works intended for a general readership. But they are conspicuous by their absence in academic and technical writing, business reports, legal documents, and other texts of a formal or official kind. In such contexts, sections tend to be numbered or have their numbers preceded by a formal section mark (§), which allows succinct and convenient cross-reference. The section-mark also allows a number contrast: ‘§3', ‘§§3–5'.

The benefit of numerical punctuation is that it allows unlimited extension, though the longer the sequence, the more difficult it will be to remember and the more likely there will be errors in cross-referencing. A complex hierarchical system, though, requires a correspondingly complex sectioning, as with the conceptual divisions in the paper edition of
The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
, where we see numerical sections extending to many subdivisions:

03.10.13.15.05.01.04
(
n
.)
Channel Islands coins

double 1862 · Jersey penny 1862– (
now History
)

Following the numbers back through the hierarchy, we are taken to:

03.10.13.15.05.01
Coins collectively

03.10.13.15.05
Currency

03.10.13.15
Money

03.10.13
Trade and commerce

03.10
Occupation/work

03
Society

What is notable about such cases is the way other typographical conventions help to keep the entries legible, such as the use of bold, italic, and roman fonts, and indention for the lexical examples. White space also separates the entries, to avoid the page appearing too dense:

03.10.13.15.05.01.03
(
n
.)
Irish coins

harp 1542–1606 · harp-groat 1543 · harped groat 1547

· rose-pence 1556 · smulkin 1571; 1617 · harp-shilling

1591;
a
1592 · harper 1598–1839 · patrick 1673/4 · thirteen

c
1720–1830 · fourpence-halfpenny 1722–1872 · thirteener

1762–1836 · tenpenny 1822–1825 · thirteen-penny 1828 ·

sun-groat 1861 · twenty-pence piece 1990–

03.10.13.15.05.01.04
(
n
.)
Channel Islands coins

double 1862 · Jersey penny 1862– (
now History
)

03.10.13.15.05.01.05
(
n
.)
Foreign coins

pening OE · pund OE · shilling

There is an immediate reduction in legibility if the white space is removed:

03.10.13.15.05.01.03
(
n
.)
Irish coins

harp 1542–1606 · harp-groat 1543 · harped groat 1547

· rose-pence 1556 · smulkin 1571; 1617 · harp-shilling

1591;
a
1592 · harper 1598–1839 · patrick 1673/4 · thirteen

c
1720–1830 · fourpence-halfpenny 1722–1872 · thirteener

1762–1836 · tenpenny 1822–1825 · thirteen-penny 1828 ·

sun-groat 1861 · twenty-pence piece 1990–

03.10.13.15.05.01.04
(
n
.)
Channel Islands coins

double 1862 · Jersey penny 1862– (
now History
)

03.10.13.15.05.01.05
(
n
.)
Foreign coins

pening OE · pund OE · shilling

Imagine a whole page like that. The Plain English Campaign in the UK makes no bones about it: ‘Use white space' is one of the basic recommendations in their online ‘Guide to design and layout'. And they explain:

Many people work hard on their writing style yet pay little attention to how their words appear on the page. They
don't realise, for example, that pages dense with body text are very off-putting.

It's a recommendation for everyone, even young learners. Children sense the value of the white space surrounding the pictures and text in their first reading books, and we often see their recognition of its value in their first attempts at continuous writing, in the way they locate their name and date at the top of a story, or lay out their words. And if a child has failed to appreciate the importance of spacing, this is the very first thing a parent or teacher needs to draw their attention to.

There's quite a lot to be learned, as being in control over white space involves several considerations. David Mackay and Joseph Simo identified six variables in their best-selling
Help Your Child to Read and Write, and More
(1976):

• you have to leave appropriate margins on each side of your lines
  
• your lines should be horizontal between these margins
  
• your letters should have spaces between them (until you learn ‘joined up')
  
• your words should have consistent word spaces between them
  
• your sentences have to have consistent sentence spaces between them
  
• your lines of writing should have consistent line spaces between them.
  

And they observe:

Children do not easily manage to control all these until they have had considerable practice in writing their own texts. They will take longer to do so if left to find them out for themselves. Discussion of the physical aspects of a
book, including the lay-out of the pages, will help them to understand what they themselves must do as writers.

For punctuation, this perspective is essential, because the contrast between the use of space and the use of marks underlies the entire orthographic system. Punctuation is all about making divisions to aid understanding in writing, and these divisions can be shown either by a physical mark or by manipulating the extent of the white space. Adapting what I said above: to mark, or not to mark, that is the question. Do I let space do the job, or do I rely on special marks to do it, or do I use a combination of the two? This is the first set of options that we all have to decide about when we start our journey along the punctuation road.

15

Paragraph preferences

In preparing to write something, our first decision – after we've chosen where to place our text on the page or screen – is whether to present it as a single block of writing or to divide it into sections. That's the top level in the punctuation hierarchy. The next decision is whether what we have to say is thematically so varied that we need to use paragraphs.

Organizing our writing into paragraphs has been a standard part of an English-teaching syllabus for generations. Traditional stylistic recommendations included the need for semantic coherence (the ‘unity' of the paragraph) and semantic focus (if the paragraph has several sentences, one of them must be ‘in control' – what is usually called the
topic sentence
). Older style guides insisted on more than one sentence per paragraph, usually at least three; but novelists, journalists, and now websites have shown that it's perfectly possible to write rhetorically effective single-sentence paragraphs. Some publishing guides recommended an upper limit (such as six sentences) to avoid paragraphs becoming visually difficult to assimilate – a helpful suggestion, as paragraphs that take up most or all of a page are certainly difficult to follow, and in non-literary writing raise questions about the writer's ability to focus. The style guides also generally insisted on the topic sentence appearing at the beginning of a paragraph – again, a helpful recommendation, but one that good writing has shown to be artificial if it's interpreted too rigidly.

For most writers, the punctuation decision in relation to a paragraph is so obvious that it hardly needs to be thought about: one indents the first line. The procedure is called
indention
or
indentation
– the choice reflects different publisher preferences – the former being more widely used, probably because it shows a closer relation with the verb (to
indent
, not to
indentate
). But even this apparently simple procedure reflects choices from a set of options. We can choose to indent, to ‘outdent', or to do neither of these things.

If we take the last course, then we need some alternative way of showing that a paragraph has come to an end, and this is done by the use of extra white space, as we saw in the previous chapter. It's a style that works well enough for short texts, such as typed letters and emails, but it fails in longer texts, for the same sort of reason that white space between sections fails: at the bottom of a page, if the last line of the paragraph happens to reach the right-hand margin, it's immediately ambiguous whether the paragraph has come to an end or not.

In texts such as letters, the choice between an indented or an unindented (‘full-block') style is a pragmatic one, reflecting what is fashionable at a particular time. (The semantic content will be the same whichever method is used.) In English, the current fashion is for the full-block style. One advisory website (Lynn Gaertner-Johnston's
Business Writing
) describes this style, where nothing is indented (including the date, address (of the recipient), salutation, closure, and signature), as ‘modern and sleek'. She contrasts this with a ‘modified block style', in which the letter-openings and -closings are centred – a style she describes as ‘less modern and sleek'. This in turn is contrasted with a ‘modified-block style with indented paragraphs', which she describes as ‘fussy and dated looking'. And she concludes:

If your organization wants to come across as up to date and elegant, choose the full-block style. If you want to appear up to date yet a bit traditional, consider the modified-block style. If you want to appear traditional and old-fashioned, the modified-block style with indented paragraphs might work, but remember that it doesn't look elegant.

Notions such as ‘traditional' and ‘elegance' may be subjective, but they are significant, and are involved at every level of the punctuation hierarchy. At the end of the day, getting the pragmatics right is perceived to be more important than any other kind of reasoning, as it can condition whether a recipient is going to be bothered to read a text at all – or, in the case of a book, whether to buy it. In the case of children learning to read, pragmatic decisions of this kind can be influential in determining whether the literacy task is made easier or more difficult.

Note that pragmatic considerations relate especially to the genre in which we are writing. I have never seen an indented email, for example. The technology motivates each paragraph of the text to start at the left-hand edge of the screen. A carriage-return automatically locates the cursor at the beginning of the line, and it would take an effort of will to introduce an indent. In writing for a blog or a website, similarly, the default software produces full-block text, and we would have to specify an indention to avoid it (and this is not always easy, or even possible with some systems). For children who have never known anything other than an Internet world, with the screen central to their communicative lives, this poses an extra difficulty that teachers need to anticipate. If indented writing is the desired style in the classroom, there is a cognitive distance between this and what is perceived to be ‘cool'. Accordingly, some discussion in class of the
pragmatic nature of the difference is bound to be helpful in fostering literacy motivation.

In typing, with margins set by the system, what I called ‘outdenting' is not something writers would ever have to consider; but it is of course possible if the system is programmed to allow it, and in handwriting it's always there as an option, so we do need to take it into account in any comprehensive view of punctuation. The style is technically called
reverse indention
or
hanging indention
, and is routinely used when information is being presented as a list, such as items in dictionaries and encyclopedias or the entries in indexes. The effect is the opposite of conventional indention, where the first line of a paragraph is indented and the other lines are ranged to the left-hand margin. With reverse indention, the first line of the paragraph is ranged to the left-hand margin, and the rest of the paragraph is indented. The
OED Thesaurus
entry at the end of the previous chapter provides an illustration, as does the index at the end of this book.

Some children seem to go in for reverse indention when they are learning to write: the first line of their stories is ranged left, and everything else is indented. The practice has probably been influenced by the layout of early readers, where pieces of text can appear against their associated illustrations in virtually any part of the page, and where an opening line may be followed by lines with varying degrees of indention. Looking through the story-books my children read when they were young, I see dozens of examples, such as this paragraph from Virginia Lee Burton's
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
(1939, but I have the Puffin Books edition of 1977). A colourful illustration takes up two-thirds of the page, and the text on the right is laid out as follows, following the curve of the picture:

When children see this kind of design alongside conventional setting, it isn't surprising to see them transfer this aspect of their reading experience into their early writing. It's one of the things that teachers soon correct.

The visual effect of reverse indention can be achieved even within an indented paragraph, if the writer wants to include a quotation or a list, as the items are usually set as indented rectangular blocks, often in a smaller point-size. The present book is an illustration. For a single quotation, indention with surrounding white space is sufficient to identify the item as semantically distinct from the surrounding text, as in the business-letter example. Quotation marks aren't used in such circumstances, nor is there further indention of the first line of the quote (though this was a practice in older books). For a list, legibility is assisted by pointing each indented item with a punctuation mark in the form of a bullet, as in the summary from Mackay and Simo at the end of the previous
chapter. A range of dingbats (p. 118) is available for this purpose, with handwritten texts often showing a great deal of personal variation, using dashes, arrows, and all kinds of idiosyncratic squiggles. In academic texts, the items may be numbered, especially if the writer wants to draw attention to a semantic progression or to refer to one of the items later in the discourse.

When preparing material that will be printed, whether on paper or screen, writers leave most of the design decisions to the publisher and typesetter. They don't need to be bothered about the amount of space to leave between paragraphs, which must be noticeable but not too much (otherwise the paragraphs will seem disconnected), as this will be decided by the printer. Similarly, the printer decides the width of the first-line indent, which again must not be too small (or it won't be seen) or too large (or the opening line will seem disassociated from the surrounding text). There's no absolute measure with such matters (though people often think in terms of ‘an inch'). The width of an indent will depend partly on the point-size of the type being used, and partly on the length of a line. A wide indent on a short line would look absurd.

However, these decisions are not just made by printers. They are made by all of us when we use handwriting, and are thus of importance in the early stages of teaching young children to write. The width of the page, and the length of the lines, will affect the overall acceptability of a child's indention. Special circumstances warrant special rules – such as the rule requiring the first letter of the first word of the first line of a letter to be located immediately under the comma at the end of the salutation:

Dear Hilary,

Many thanks for your letter …

A different practice insists on having the first word of the first line underneath the first letter of the addressee's name:

Dear Hilary,

Many thanks for your letter …

Teachers pass their preferences on to their pupils, and once learned, indention habits stay with us for ever – at least, among those adults who still do use handwriting – and are rarely varied.

Any account of indention, finally, must allow for cases where the options differ because a special convention is being used. Look at the beginning of any chapter in this book: no indention for the opening line. Nor, in books where chapters contain subheadings, will there be indention for the opening line after the subheading. The same convention affects the first lines of magazines and newspaper articles. It was not always this way: a century ago, we routinely see indention for opening lines, as in this example from
Punch
(4 February 1914):

In addition, the fact that the reader is encountering an opening line may be reinforced by other punctuational conventions. The first letter may be larger than the rest (a
drop capital
), often very much larger, as we saw in the
Oxford Gazette
(p. 113) – a practice that has its origins in early manuscripts. If the first letter isn't larger, the first word or two of the text may be printed entirely in capitals, so that we read:

A MEETING of European ministers

being held in Brussels is likely to end

with little agreement, despite the late

A combination of semantic (attention-drawing) and pragmatic (house-style) factors underlies such practices, which are enormously varied, reflecting the concern of individual institutions and publications to maintain a distinctive visual identity.

Variation is also the dominant impression as we extend our reading experience across genres, and across texts within genres. The relative prominence of sentences within a paragraph can be made explicit by typography, such as bold type, italics, or underlining – a much-used strategy in an era when large amounts of text and small amounts of time combine to motivate rapid reading. Whole paragraphs may be highlighted in this way. In particular, the paragraph theme can be made to stand out by being inserted in a contrasting style at the beginning of the first line: