Making a Point

by David Crystal

  Accordingly, while printers took a great deal of care over the way they typeset religious, legal, educational, historical, and other scholarly works, they were notoriously casual when dealing with plays, as they knew they would not be treated with the same level of attention. They must have been taken aback when they encountered a playwright who cared. But the new genres of spelling guide, dictionary (the first in 1604, Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall), and grammar were a different matter. And during the seventeenth century we see a large increase in their numbers, with the authors looking in unprecedented detail at the way their writing was presented, and keeping an eye on punctuation as never before.

  8

  Grammar rules

  The century after Jonson saw the publication of many pedagogical guides to punctuation, but there’s no agreement among them about how best to handle it. The messy situation of the sixteenth century, outlined in Chapter 6, remained. Is punctuation a guide to pronunciation or a way of making a text easy to read? Is its purpose elocutional and rhetorical, or is it to do with meaning and grammar?

  As the teaching of grammar became routine in schools, and as more treatments of English grammar became available, we see the second approach becoming the norm. Grammar offered the possibility of system and order where previously there had been variation and idiosyncrasy. An approach favouring actors and orators highlighted the problem: how could half-a-dozen or so marks ever cope with the multifarious tones, tunes, and pauses of the speaking voice? Grammars, by contrast, recognized just eight parts of speech and showed an apparently limited number of ways of combining these into sentences. If anything could bring punctuation under control, it was going to be grammar.

  That is why we begin to see such titles as Mark Lewis’s Plain and Short Rules for Pointing Periods Grammatically (published in about 1672). Not all grammarians were interested, but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about 60 per cent of the published grammars did deal with the topic, even though we can sense at times a certain reluctance to do so. For writers with a prescriptive temperament, looking to establish clear-cut grammatical rules of correct usage – the approach that became the norm by the second half of the eighteenth century – punctuation was something of a nuisance.

  We can see these reservations in the most influential school grammar of the mid-eighteenth century: Bishop Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), which ends with a chapter on punctuation. He draws a contrast between speech and writing: we have a variety of ways in speech to express the connections between sentences, he says, but in writing ‘the whole number of Points, which we have to express this variety, amounts only to Four … the Period, Colon, Semicolon, and Comma’. And he goes on:

  So the doctrine of Punctuation must needs be very imperfect: few precise rules can be given which will hold without exception in all cases; but much must be left to the judgement and taste of the writer. … It remains, therefore, that we be content with the Rules of Punctuation, laid down with as much exactness as the nature of the subject will admit: such as may serve for a general direction, to be accommodated to different occasions; and to be supplied, where deficient, by the writer’s judgement.

  Lowth has often been described as the source of grammatical prescriptivism, but his grammar is much more nuanced in his descriptions, as these remarks illustrate.

  This is the pattern followed by all the grammar-books that deal with punctuation. They start off confidently, list a series of rules, and conclude by warning readers that the rules don’t always work. Books exclusively devoted to punctuation follow the same course. Joseph Robertson’s An Essay on Punctuation (1785) illustrates the continuing emphasis on grammar. By contrast with writers such as Mulcaster and Jonson (Chapter 7), his opening definition doesn’t even mention pronunciation at all:

  Punctuation is the art of dividing a discourse into periods, and those periods into their constituent parts: namely, a comma, a semicolon, a colon, &c.

  He then lists forty rules governing the use of the comma in various parts of the sentence, and illustrates them in detail. Other marks are dealt with in less detail, and are similarly handled in terms of ‘rules’.

  But at the end of the book, Robertson has a prominent page headed ‘Conclusion’, where we read:

  These rules, I must confess, are liable to some exceptions, and are not sufficient to direct the learner in EVERY imaginable combination of words and phrases. It would indeed be impossible to frame such a system of rules, as should comprehend the whole extent of the language.

  He just hopes that his approach will help the reader to

  divide his sentences, both in reading and writing, with greater accuracy and precision, than they are usually divided in the generality of books, wherein the punctuation is arbitrary and capricious, and founded on no general principles.

  The problem is that, when we examine his rules in detail, we find they don’t avoid the same criticisms. For instance, he’s against inserting a comma between the subject and verb of a clause:

  The society of ladies, is a school of politeness.

  This is ‘improper’, he says, and the comma should be omitted.

  On the other hand, he sensibly recognizes that it may be necessary to pause after a lengthy construction:

  When the clauses are short, and closely connected, the point may be omitted. On the contrary, a simple sentence, when it is a long one, may admit of a pause.

  And he illustrates this from another sentence:

  The good taste of the present age, has not allowed us to neglect the cultivation of the English language.

  But if we compare the number of syllables in ‘short’ and ‘long’ examples, we find that they are the same – eight in each case. So why the comma in the second case and not the first? What counts as a ‘long’ sentence element? This is the kind of question the grammarians were unable to answer.

  The year after Robertson published his Essay, David Steel wrote Elements of Punctuation, in which he goes through Robertson’s rules one by one, adds his own commentary, and illustrates good practice from a variety of authors (notably Milton). He’s in total agreement that grammar ‘ought to be the basis of punctuation’, but we quickly see the warnings appear. The use of periods poses few problems, he suggests, and the placement of commas can be decided with a good grammatical awareness of sentence construction, but when it comes to the distinction between colon and semicolon, he gives up:

  they are both chiefly useful in marking the degree of connexion between one sentence and another, and, in this, the connexion may be so variously felt, by different people, that two will seldom agree in the use of these points in the same passage.

  He concludes:

  A nice acquaintance with punctuation is not, in my opinion, attainable by rules, as a knowledge of syntax may be acquired, but it must be procured by a kind of internal conviction, that the rules of grammar are never to be violated.

  Where do we get this ‘internal conviction’ from? By reading good authors: ‘a reference to books would teach the minutiæ better than any rules.’ But as authors show diverse practices, it all comes down, in the end, to personal preference. He acknowledges that his own preference is to overpunctuate:

  Whenever I am doubtful if a sentence will admit a comma, I generally end my hesitation by inserting it, provided it does not militate against grammar; always preferring a rigid to a relaxed punctuation.

  We see a similar subjectivity in the most influential of all the eighteenth-century grammars, written by Lindley Murray. His English Grammar (1795) sold over 20 million copies, and was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, continuing to be used throughout the nineteenth century and being repeatedly acknowledged. The essayist Thomas de Quincey, writing in Blackwood’s Magazine (April 1839), described the way it ‘reigns despotically through the young ladies’ schools, from the Orkneys to the Cornish Scillys’. And in Chapter 29 of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), Charles Dickens describes Mrs Jarley’s efforts t
o attract a new class of audience to her waxworks:

  And these audiences were of a very superior description, including a great many young ladies’ boarding-schools, whose favour Mrs Jarley had been at great pains to conciliate, by altering the face and costume of Mr Grimaldi as clown to represent Mr Lindley Murray as he appeared when engaged in the composition of his English Grammar …

  Whenever the satirical magazine Punch wanted to draw attention to ‘bad grammar’, it would always refer to Murray, even in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

  When he comes to punctuation, Murray is well aware that he’s dealing with something special. He treats it in a separate chapter, immediately adding a footnote:

  As punctuation is intended to aid both the sense and the pronunciation of a sentence, it could not have been exclusively discussed under the part of Syntax, or of Prosody. The nature of the subject, its extent and importance, and the grammatical knowledge which it presupposes, have induced me to make it a distinct and subsequent article.

  He then follows Lowth and earlier writers by repeating the phonetic equation:

  The Comma represents the shortest pause; the Semicolon, a pause double that of the comma; the Colon, double that of the semicolon; and the Period, double that of the colon.

  He accepts that the pauses can’t be given an absolute value, as speech can be faster or slower; but he insists that ‘the proportion between the pauses should be ever invariable’.

  He then gives examples of the four main marks, devoting most space to the comma. Again following earlier writers – and often copying their examples – he identifies twenty rules relating commas to various types of syntactic construction. Some rules would later be contentious, such as his use of the ‘serial comma’ (see Chapter 26):

  The husband, wife, and children, suffered extremely.

  David was a brave, wise, and pious man.

  And some of his rules would now be seen as unnecessarily heavy, such as his recommendation that words like so, hence, and first should be set off by commas:

  He feared want, hence, he over-valued riches.

  But all of his rules would be followed, often slavishly, by several generations of grammarians and schoolteachers.

  However, even Murray could see that there were factors present that couldn’t be reduced to simple rules. His final paragraph on the comma reiterates Robertson’s concern about length: ‘In many of the foregoing rules and examples great regard must be paid to the length of the clauses, and the proportion which they bear to one another.’ But note how he concludes: this will ‘enable the student to adjust the proper pauses, and the places for inserting the commas’. In the end, it comes down, as Lowth had said, to ‘the writer’s judgement’.

  An important point to note is that Murray clearly saw the two functions of punctuation: ‘to aid both the sense and the pronunciation of a sentence’. This is a significant improvement on the views of people like Robertson, and it had already been identified by Steel, who saw how grammar and pronunciation could be connected:

  Punctuation should lead to the sense; the sense will guide to modulation and emphasis.

  This anticipates the important role given to semantics in the twentieth century (see Chapter 11).

  Steel and Murray were writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, and had evidently been influenced by the new breed of elocutionists, who had been attacking any approach to punctuation that focused exclusively on grammar. The most influential of these elocutionists was Thomas Sheridan (1719–1788), the father of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His mid-century lectures on elocution were delivered to packed halls all over the country. A series could attract well over 1500 people, each paying a guinea to attend – which, translated into modern values, would be around £150,000. He also published his lectures as a course, selling at half-a-guinea a time. Elocution was big business, and people were prepared to pay for it in their desire to acquire a manner of speaking that would be elegant and acceptable in high society. There is, says Sheridan in his opening sentence, ‘a general inability to read, or speak, with propriety and grace in public’. A correct understanding of punctuation, he thinks, is part of the solution.

  He’s in no doubt that punctuation is partly to blame for the malaise. Echoing Ben Jonson in the previous century, in his fifth lecture he points the finger at two familiar characters:

  There is no article in reading more difficult than that of observing a due proportion of stops, occasioned by the very erroneous and inaccurate manner, in which they are marked by printers and writers.

  For Sheridan, concerned with effective reading aloud, the punctuation system is hopeless. He observes that it works inefficiently in both directions: there are many occasions when you need to pause in speech but there are no commas in the writing to guide you; and there are many occasions when there are commas in the writing but there should be no pause in speech. The grammarians are to blame, he thinks, because they have developed a model of punctuation that is of little relevance to the public speaker:

  The truth is, the modern art of punctuation was not taken from the art of speaking, which was never studied by the moderns, but was in great measure regulated by the rules of grammar.

  And there is a third villain in Sheridan’s sights: teachers. In his opening lecture he talks of the way the schools have failed in providing students with a proper understanding of ‘the visible marks of the pauses and rests of the voice’:

  the masters have not only been more negligent in perfecting pupils in the right use of these, but in their method of teaching, have laid down some false rules, under the influence of which, it is impossible that any one can read naturally.

  False rules – the perennial and unavoidable criticism of spelling and punctuation manuals that has continued down to the present day.

  It was perhaps a little unfair to blame the teachers, who for the most part were simply doing what the writers of the best-selling grammars were telling them to do. But Sheridan was right to single out the grammarians, whose focus had largely been on the syntactically intricate sentences of the written language, with little reference to speech other than the most basic recommendations about pausing. Anyone who tried to read a text aloud using the phonetic equations of Murray et al. would never hold an audience for long.

  However, the elocutionists couldn’t stop the grammatical steamroller. It’s clear from the way authors wrote during the eighteenth century that they increasingly felt complex sentences needed a correspondingly explicit punctuation, with every syntactically important element identified to avoid uncertainty over how to read a discourse. The punctuation became heavier and heavier, as writers accepted the recommendations of the grammarians, and in cases of doubt added – like David Steel – extra marks.

  The result can be illustrated by a sentence from the preface to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755):

  It will sometimes be found, that the accent is placed by the authour quoted, on a different syllable from that marked in the alphabetical series; it is then to be understood, that custom has varied, or that the authour has, in my opinion, pronounced wrong.

  It’s easy to see what has happened: a comma is used to identify the main chunks of syntax that make up the whole, and a semicolon links two sentences that are felt to be closely related in meaning. Some writers or printers would have gone even further than that, such as by separating the adverbs and writing ‘It will, sometimes, be found’ or ‘it is, then, to be understood’. But a lightly punctuated version, such as the following, is something we don’t see until the twentieth century:

  It will sometimes be found that the accent is placed by the authour quoted on a different syllable from that marked in the alphabetical series. It is then to be understood that custom has varied or that the authour has in my opinion pronounced wrong.

  If you feel this is underpunctuated you may add commas to suit your taste; but few modern readers would insert as many as we see in Johnson.

  Grammarians an
d elocutionists may have had their differences, but they were united on one point: opposition to the printers, whose ‘negligence’ had been remarked on by Jonson, Sheridan, and others. Both groups were concerned with establishing principles, and they didn’t see much principle in the way the printers worked. It was time for a change. The printers had had their own way for too long.

  Interlude: A punctuation heavyweight

  Joshua Steele’s An essay towards establishing the melody and measure of speech (1775) is a typical example of the heavy punctuation encountered in eighteenth-century texts. This is an extract from a letter, seen as a quotation, and thus marked by opening inverted commas at the beginning of each line – a normal convention of the time. Only one line lacks a punctuation mark; line 6 has four commas. Even the page number is set off by brackets.

  9

  The printer’s dilemma

  I imagine the state of mind of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century printers was similar to Caxton’s, 300 years before: ‘Lo! what should a man in these days now write?’ They were in a difficult position, as they had two diametrically opposed kinds of author to deal with. One kind – let’s call them Jonsonians – were scrupulous about punctuation, and insisted on checking every mark for printing accuracy, getting very annoyed if a printer dared to change anything. The other kind – let’s call them Wordsworthians – couldn’t have cared less, and were extremely grateful to get any help they could.