Making a Point

by David Crystal

  Throughout the nineteenth century, we see a growing realization that the existing grammar-books weren’t providing the answers that people wanted. How could they, when they persistently expressed their uncertainty over rules and introduce their personal preferences? But there was no alternative. The only kind of grammars that were available were those derived from Murray. Every decade in the century thus produced treatises on punctuation which could do no more than state that the problem still existed and reformulate the same tired answers. One final example, before we move on, from the most influential of all guidelines to appear in the 1900s: Horace Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press Oxford, first published in 1893 as a single sheet of guidance, and soon amplified into a small book (I quote from a 1950 edition). Hart was printer for Oxford University and controller of the university press for over thirty years.

  This is a wide-ranging work, which at times goes well beyond what an author or grammarian would need to know, dealing with the typographical aesthetics of punctuation. For example, Hart recommends thin spaces to be used before apostrophes in such phrases as that’s (= that is) in order to distinguish them from the ones used to mark possession. He allows no space between the initials in a name: W.E. Gladstone, not W. E. Gladstone. Indentation of the first lines of paragraphs is to be generally one em (the width of a letter m). No grammarian or author, not even Mark Twain, would be exercised about such things.

  Hart maintains the traditional view about writers and punctuation, that they are ‘almost without exception either too busy or too careless to regard it’, and he accepts the responsibility of doing something about it. He knows that compositors are human too, and even quotes Alford’s ‘However’ example to illustrate the way in which they have sometimes let authors down (p. 72). But where is the printer’s knowledge of punctuation to come from?

  The compositor is recommended to study attentively a good treatise on the whole subject. He will find some knowledge of it to be indispensable if his work is to be done properly.

  The advice isn’t as sound as it seems. A good treatise is presumably one that would have provided Hart with answers to all the punctuation decisions that he had to make, as well as explaining the stylistic variation that existed. And the sad fact of the matter is: there was no such thing.

  The grammarians let Hart and his earlier colleagues down in several ways. The treatises often failed to agree in their recommendations (such as whether to set off single adverbs by commas). Books written at different periods reflected changes in fashion (such as whether to punctuate abbreviations). Any late nineteenth-century printer following Lindley Murray would find that several of Murray’s rules were no longer being observed by most writers (such as whether to put a comma between subject and predicate). And in place of principles that could be learned and applied, there would often be little guidance other than a general statement followed by examples, from which the reader was supposed to be able to generalize. Hart could do no other than adopt the same practice. For example, his section on the semicolon begins simply: ‘Instances in which the semicolon is appropriate.’ There’s no further explanation of what is meant by ‘appropriate’, or what an inappropriate use of a semicolon might be.

  Hart knows what the core problem is: there are two systems in use, one he calls ‘close and stiff’ (a heavy style), the other ‘open or easy’ (a light style). He doesn’t think it’s the job of the printer to tell an author which one should be used. But when he looks at the grammars, he finds that they say the same thing: where usage is divided, the ultimate decision about punctuation rests with the author. So studying attentively a ‘good treatise’ is not always going to help. When a manuscript displaying unusual punctuation arrives at the publishers, is the idiosyncrasy due to authorial ignorance or authorial deliberation? If one of Hart’s staff makes a change, will the response be Wordsworthian delight or Twainian fury?

  What the nineteenth century shows is that punctuation is a classic case of ‘passing the buck’. When there is a confident writer, a competent printer, and a straightforward grammatical or rhetorical decision to be made, there’s no problem. But where there is uncertainty over how to punctuate, disagreement among the professionals, or inconsistency in a published work, we see circles of shifting blame and responsibilities. Writers ask publishers to sort out their inadequacies. The publishers do the best they can, but when things go wrong they blame their correctors or compositors or cite a lack of guidance from grammarians. The grammarians do the best they can, but when their rules don’t work they explain it by referring to divided usage among – the writers. The writers blame themselves or the way they were taught in school. The schoolteachers explain that they are only doing what they have been told to do by the grammars, or by the dictats of a government-approved syllabus. And ministries of education, concerned about standards of achievement, make decisions based on what they think is the best practice – of grammarians and writers.

  The printers looked to the grammarians for help; and the grammarians sometimes looked to the printers. A good example is the way Lindley Murray adds a section of his grammar devoted to ‘other characters, which are frequently made use of in composition’. He lists the apostrophe, caret, circumflex accent, hyphen, acute accent (showing stress), breve (to show vowel length), diæresis (Murray’s spelling – ¨ to separate vowels), section mark (§), paragraph mark (¶), quotation marks, crotchets (square brackets), index (the hand ), brace (}), asterisk, ellipsis (…), obelisk (†), and parallels (||) – the last two showing sidenotes or footnotes. (Wilson goes even further in his listing of special symbols, including astronomical, mathematical, and medical signs.) Each item is given a brief description and illustration of its use. Murray’s account is by no means complete – for example, he shows the apostrophe being used only with singular nouns, as in ‘a man’s property’ – but his explanations are accurate as far as they go, and in some cases are quite detailed, as in his description of the asterisk:

  An Asterisk, or small star *, directs the reader to some note in the margin, or at the bottom of a page. Two or three asterisks generally denote the omission of some letters in a word, or of some bold or indelicate expression, or some defect in the manuscript.

  None of this information comes from his thinking as a grammarian. It derives from his experience as a reader and from working with printers.

  A century on from Horace Hart, nothing much seems to have changed with respect to punctuation. Grammars and style manuals keep saying rules have exceptions. Copy-editors regularly debate best practice. Rows between publishers and authors continue, as do rows between teachers and politicians. Children may have their homework corrected in different ways by different teachers in the same school. The average adult, left with a legacy of uncertainty, buys a self-help manual and then finds it doesn’t solve the problem. Popular guides, such as Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, do a grand job persuading people that punctuation matters, and that we need standards, but do not give a complete account of what those standards are, or provide an explanation of all the variation that exists. Matters then come to the boil, as they did in 2013, when teachers and parents find their children are having answers marked wrong in school punctuation tests solely because the examiners have discounted what is actually a widely accepted usage (see Chapter 26).

  It seems as if the problem of punctuation is insoluble. But looking at it from the point of view of modern linguistics, this is only because people have been approaching the subject in an incomplete way, opting for partial accounts, and ignoring some critical factors. In particular, the kind of grammatical approach we’ve seen so far hasn’t been as helpful as it needed to be. Although a great deal of what Lowth, Murray, and their disciples had to say was accurate enough, and would be echoed in any modern grammar, their accounts were short, selective, artificial in their prescriptions, and unbalanced in their coverage. The parts of speech were treated in some detail, but the description of sentence structure, and the
way elements of the sentence interacted, was superficial. This is a deficit that would not be corrected until the emergence of descriptive grammars during the twentieth century; but it had immediate consequences for the way these authors presented punctuation.

  To give just one illustration of what I mean: as we’ll see in Chapter 13, there is a hierarchy of importance in punctuation, relating to the hierarchy that exists in grammar. All grammars agree that the sentence is the most important feature, and should be dealt with first. We would therefore expect the first mark to be treated in any account of punctuation to be the period, as this is the main way in which a sentence is identified. But traditional accounts all begin with the comma – even Wilson’s, who totally accepted the need for a grammatical approach – and don’t deal with periods until after they’ve worked their way through semicolons and colons. It’s easy to see why. They are following the old system of pause length, beginning with the shortest pause and moving towards the largest. But how can we understand the role of the marks that occur within sentences if we have not first understood the marks that identify sentences as wholes? We need a more sophisticated sense of grammatical structure if we’re going to make progress in developing a more satisfactory approach to punctuation.

  We also need a more comprehensive frame of reference. History clearly shows us that a phonetic approach, focusing on the impact of punctuation on listening and speaking, is not the whole story. Nor is the whole story told through a grammatical approach, focusing on the way punctuation is used in reading and writing. Some sort of combined account is essential. But neither of these approaches can provide the whole solution to the problem because the factors that account for divided usage involve issues that fall outside of these domains. In particular, the subjectivity that seems to be inherent in punctuation – for every writer refers to it – has to be acknowledged. If we want a complete explanation of the way punctuation marks are used, we need to incorporate a further two perspectives that have received only passing mention in my historical account: semantics and pragmatics.

  Interlude: The Good Child’s Book of Stops

  It didn’t take long for nineteenth-century publishers to realize that punctuation presented children with difficulties similar to those encountered in spelling and grammar, and they began to publish colourful and playful accounts of the various marks. Leinstein Madame, as she is called on the title page of The Good Child’s Book of Stops, which is undated, but appeared around 1825, is plainly an advocate of the phonetic approach. She recommends a steady increase in pause lengths as the child moves from comma to semicolon to colon to period. It’s not as drastic an equation as the doubling method advocated by some earlier writers, which ended up with eight beats for a point; but it is still artificial, bearing no relation to what people actually do when reading aloud. Try reading any piece of prose aloud by counting in this way, and watch how quickly you lose your listeners.

  11

  The way forward: meanings and effects

  One of the messages that comes across loud and clear over the centuries is that punctuation is all about meaning. That’s the bottom line, whether we think of the written language as something to be read aloud or to be read in silence. It’s the need to make the meaning of a written text clear that motivates our use of punctuation. Clarity. Making sense. Avoiding ambiguity. These are the words that turn up over and over in books and essays on punctuation. Authors continually stress the need to bear meaning or sense in mind when thinking about which mark to use. David Steel: ‘Punctuation should lead to the sense.’ John Wilson: ‘The chief aim in pointing a discourse, and its several branches, is to develop, as clearly as possible, the meaning of the writer.’ Meaning is the subject-matter of semantics, which is why a semantic approach to punctuation is important. Grammar plays a critical role in making sense, but other aspects of language contribute too, such as vocabulary and the way we talk about our tones of voice (he said briskly). When we are thinking of how to express something in writing, or working out what a piece of writing means, we take all these semantic cues into account.

  But semantics alone is not enough to account for the way we use language. Often we’re faced with a choice when we want to express a particular meaning – a choice that conveys different intentions or effects. In grammar, for example, we have the choice of writing I will or I’ll: the meaning is the same, but the effect is different – the second usage is more informal than the first. Similarly, in punctuation we are sometimes offered a choice of forms, such as whether to use a comma or not, or whether to use single or double inverted commas, and we need to know what the consequences are of using one rather than the other. Authors continually stress the need for punctuation to be effective – to help orators or writers elicit a desired response in their listeners or readers – and this is a matter of choosing the right marks. Authors also find it important that a page should ‘look’ right, and this too is a matter of choosing the right marks. Making choices is at the heart of pragmatics, which is why a pragmatic approach to punctuation is important. It’s here that we will explore many of the loose ends that we’ve seen bedevilling earlier accounts, such as references to a writer’s ‘judgement’ or ‘taste’.

  We need to use both perspectives, semantic and pragmatic, when evaluating punctuation. If you find it difficult to understand what someone has written because of the way punctuation has been used, then you’re reacting semantically. But if you don’t like the look of what someone has written – saying, for example, that a page is ‘cluttered’ – then you’re reacting pragmatically. Pragmatics is a particularly important perspective because it focuses on explaining rather than simply describing usage. Why did we use a particular punctuation mark? Why didn’t we use some other mark instead? What was the intention of the writer? What was the effect upon the reader? The answers take us into a world well beyond linguistics, as they are to do with the writer’s social background, cognitive skills, occupation, education, and aesthetic sensibility. No account of punctuation will ever succeed if it doesn’t consider all these factors. And no-one will ever learn to punctuate well – or teach punctuation well – if they remain unaware of these factors, and how they interact.

  The semantic approach is the one we see represented throughout the history of punctuation. As we saw earlier, it was the chief concern of many writers in antiquity, such as St Augustine, worrying over the ambiguity of signs, and it provides a continuous theme in later writing. During the eighteenth century especially, we find innumerable teaching exercises in which the student has to add marks to an unpunctuated piece of text in order to show its meaning. There are many ingenious examples. One of my favourites is the sentence used by the anonymous author of The Expert Orthographist (1704):

  Christ saith St Peter died for us.

  The author invites us to consider what would happen if we put a comma after saith, as opposed to two commas, after Christ and Peter. It’s an early instance of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In all such cases, punctuation resolves the difference between two (or more) meanings. This is semantics.

  Teachers in the nineteenth century used to play semantic punctuation games, to make their students aware of the importance of the subject. This verse was very well known:

  Every lady in this land

  Hath twenty nails upon each hand;

  Five and twenty on hands and feet:

  And this is true, without deceit.

  The student has to work out what has gone wrong, and present a correctly punctuated alternative:

  Every lady in this land

  Hath twenty nails; upon each hand

  Five; and twenty on hands and feet:

  And this is true, without deceit.

  Percival Leigh does similar things in a short chapter on punctuation in his Comic English Grammar (1840). He recommends that a student consider ‘the different effects which a piece of poetry, for instance, which he has been accustomed to regard as sublime or beautiful, will have, when liberties are taken with it in
that respect’. And he takes liberties with Shakespeare to illustrate his approach, such as Macbeth’s exclamation to his frightened servant:

  Where get’st thou that goose look?

  which he rewrites as:

  Where get’st thou that goose? Look!

  Teachers do the same sort of thing today.

  The pragmatic approach can be illustrated from one of the main trends that affected punctuation during the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, people were showing their addresses in correspondence like this:

  Mr. J. B. Smith,

  144, Central Ave.,

  London, S.W.1.

  By the late 1900s, it was like this:

  Mr J B Smith

  144 Central Ave

  London SW1

  There’s no difference in meaning between these two examples; but there is a major difference in fashion. A heavily punctuated style was normal at the beginning of the twentieth century; a punctuation minimalism at the end. This is pragmatics.

  The pragmatic approach is not so often encountered in early writing on punctuation, though it’s there in antiquity when writers discuss how to punctuate a text so that orators can be more effective in getting their message across. But pragmatic judgements about the use of punctuation increased as writing became stylistically more diverse. By the eighteenth century, legal, religious, journalistic, and historical writing had each developed its individual style of punctuation. As a result, to judge the punctuation in a piece of writing it became necessary not only to ask ‘Is it clear?’, but also ‘Is it appropriate?’ And a punctuation style that would be judged acceptable in one set of circumstances might well be judged unacceptable in another.