Making a Point

by David Crystal

  We need both semantic and pragmatic perspectives if we’re to develop the kind of combined approach to punctuation I recommended at the end of the previous chapter. Successful communication, whether through speaking or writing, requires that we express ourselves clearly, and present our language in a way that allows our intention to be effectively conveyed to our addressee(s). And with each written communicative act, we need to make a decision as to whether we need punctuation – and if so, what kind – to enable this to happen.

  Our choice of punctuation is going to be chiefly guided by semantic or pragmatic considerations. Normally, it will be semantics: we will aim to make our meaning clear to the reader. But there are occasions when pragmatic factors take precedence: we can decide to use a mark, or not use a mark, because it looks beautiful/ugly, because it’s easier/more difficult to write/type/text, because it’s available/unavailable in a chosen font, because it takes up more/less space on a page, or simply because we were taught that way (without necessarily knowing why). In particular, the ‘look’ of the page can become a priority in guiding our choices of which punctuation marks to use. This turns out to be a major factor in literary writing.

  An aesthetic reason is clearly at the forefront of novelist Cormac McCarthy’s mind. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2008, he comments: ‘There’s no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks.’ And in his most famous novel, The Road (2006), we see the result of this view (the extract is from p. 247):

  They hurried down the beach against the light. What if the boat washes away? the boy said.

  It wont wash away.

  It could.

  No it wont. Come on. Are you hungry?

  Yes.

  We’re going to eat well tonight. But we need to get a move on.

  I’m hurrying, Papa.

  And it may rain.

  How can you tell?

  I can smell it.

  Although the reason given for this sparse style is pragmatic – achieving an uncluttered look to the page – it’s important to note that the choice is also partly semantic. The style gives an impression of bareness and simplicity, which works well with stories that have primitive, unsophisticated, or apocalyptic themes – and The Road is nothing if not apocalyptic.

  Authors aren’t always the best judges of their own writing when it comes to punctuation. McCarthy says: ‘if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate … I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.’ But actually, that isn’t it. Even in this short extract we see question marks, line indention, and some use of apostrophes – and in his interview he admits that colons are important, as when introducing a list. Writers do tend to underestimate the extent to which they rely on punctuation, even if they are minimalists.

  We also need to note that choices in punctuation have consequences for other areas of language. A minimalist approach has an immediate effect on style. If you choose not to have quotation marks, you have to write in such a way that it’s absolutely clear who is speaking. McCarthy knows this, and remarks about those writers who want to follow his style: ‘you really have to be aware that there are no quotation marks to guide people and write in such a way that it’s not confusing about who’s speaking.’ He himself puts in clues, as we see above with ‘the boy said’ and ‘Papa’. The extract also illustrates how the conversational turns between participants need to be short, so that the reader doesn’t lose track. McCarthy acknowledges: ‘It’s important to punctuate so that it makes it easy for people to read.’ But to do without marks such as semicolons, sentences also have to be short and structurally simple – as they are in McCarthy’s style. As soon as they become complex, with many subordinate clauses, the pressure to add punctuation can’t be ignored.

  McCarthy admired James Joyce. ‘James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum.’ When people say this, they’re usually thinking of examples such as the final sequence in Ulysses, where Molly Bloom has a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy that goes on for over forty pages, and is punctuationless apart from occasional paragraph indention. Here Joyce is more daring than McCarthy, in that he makes no use at all of the apostrophe (he has Im for I’m as well as such forms as couldnt for couldn’t). A new paragraph begins:

  that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the heat I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night …

  But note the consequences for Joyce’s sentence construction. In stream-of-consciousness, the sense-units being connected (sentences, clauses, phrases) are short and self-contained, enabling us to process it (or, as actors, to read it aloud) chunk by chunk. As soon as Joyce wants to go in for a multi-person dialogue or to develop an idea in a more complex way, this technique no longer works, and punctuation comes back in.

  Most of Ulysses is punctuated. There are no quotation marks, but a long dash introduces a new speaker. As well as periods and commas, we find question marks, exclamation marks, apostrophes, colons, semicolons, and ellipsis dots. Even in Molly’s soliloquy there are initial capitals for names, a few names in italics, forward slashes (as in 1/4, and in abbreviations such as 6/-), and an instance of letter substitution (a--e for arse). The impression of punctuation-lessness comes chiefly from the absence of quotation marks – a technique increasingly used by present-day writers, such as McCarthy, NoViolet Bulawayo (illustrated below), and Cynan Jones in The Dig (2014).

  These examples illustrate the way creative writers can manipulate punctuation marks for semantic and pragmatic effect. But the success of their writing depends on their awareness of the consequences of these manipulations, otherwise readers won’t be able to follow what is going on. If a writer deviates too far from the conventional use of punctuation, the result can be ambiguity or unintelligibility (from a semantic point of view) or inappropriateness or unacceptability (from a pragmatic point of view). A poet might get away with a lot of rule-breaking – as we will see in the case of E E Cummings (or e e cummings, as later writers, delighting in his penchant for typographical innovation, described him) – but most writing circumstances don’t allow a great deal of deviance.

  At least, when you’re alive, you can make your own case to the publisher about preserving your desired punctuation. But what happens after you’re dead? A different character now joins the company of punctuation-deciders listed in Chapter 10: the literary editor, ready to make fresh semantic and pragmatic decisions.

  Interlude: Punctuation minimalism

  The impression of unsophisticated innocence in NoViolet Bulawayo’s story We Need New Names (2013) is well conveyed by the absence of quotation marks. The child narrator, from Africa but now living in America, describes how she met a woman at a wedding (the extract is from Chapter 12):

  Can you just say something in your language? she says. I laugh a small laugh, because what do you say to that? But the woman is fixing me with this expectant stare, which means she is not playing, so I say:

  I don’t know, what do you want me to say?

  Well, anything, really.

  I let out an inward sigh because this is so stupid, but I remember to keep my face smiling. I say one word, sa-li-bona-ni, and I say it slowly so she doesn’t ask me to repeat it. She doesn’t.

  Isn’t that beautiful, she says. Now she’s looking at me like I’m a wonder, like I just made magic happen.

  What language is that? she says. I tell her, and she tells me it’s beautiful, again, and I tell her thank you. Then she asks me what country I’m from and I tell her.

  It’s beautiful over there, isn’t it? she says. I nod even though I don’t know why I’m nodding. I just do. To this lady, maybe everything is beautiful.

  12

  Interfering with Jane Austen

  This is the
opening sentence of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818):

  Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed.

  Readers have long admired the balanced and elegant character of this sentence, with its three there-constructions building up a rhetorical peak, subtly linked by semicolons. But the punctuation is almost certainly spurious. That’s not how she wrote at all.

  We know this thanks to a splendid project, led by Professor Kathryn Sutherland of the University of Oxford, which has collated all the extant handwritten fiction manuscripts of Jane Austen in digital form. You can see them online at the appropriately named . There isn’t very much, as all the original manuscripts of the novels were destroyed after the books were printed – routine practice in an age long before author’s holographs came to be valued in the way they are today. But what survives gives us a remarkable insight into her way of writing. And it is a goldmine for punctuation enthusiasts.

  Page 4 of the rejected Chapter 10 of Persuasion. It is written in brown iron-gall ink – a medium used by most English writers from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century. The quoted extract begins at line 3.

  Here’s a short extract from Persuasion, from one of two chapters (page 4 of Chapter 10) which are the only surviving examples in Austen’s handwriting of a novel that was completed for publication. If you know the book well, you won’t recognize the text because these chapters were replaced in the published version. She changed the ending – and fortunately the unrevised text was never destroyed.

  At last however, he was able to in:

  :vite her upstairs, & stepping before her

  said — “I shall will just go up with

  you myself & shew you in — I cannot

  stay, because I must go to the P. office,

  5

  but if you will only sit down for

  5 minutes I am sure Sophy will

  come. ––– and you will find nobody

  to disturb you — there is nobody but

  Frederick here —” opening the door as

  10

  he spoke. — Such a person to be paſsed

  over as a Nobody to her! — After being

  allowed to feel quite secure — indifferent

  —at her ease, to have it burst on her

  that she was to be the next moment

  15

  in the same room with him! —

  No time for recollection! — for plan:

  :ning behaviour, or regulating man:

  :ners! — There was time only to turn

  pale, …

  I’ve chosen an extract where there is hardly any crossing-out, so that the style can be more easily seen. There are several interesting punctuation features. Word-breaks at the end of a line aren’t signalled by hyphens, but by two colons – one at the end of the first line and the other at the beginning of the next (a throwback to the ancient tradition described in Chapter 3). Frequent exclamation marks convey the character’s excitement. And above all, there are the dashes – a notable characteristic of Austen’s style.

  Handwriting does many things that print cannot do. The spatial relation of lines to each other can alter dramatically. Letter-sizes can vary enormously in a way that the contrast between upper-case and lower-case cannot capture. And if a dash is there to represent a pause, then the length of the dash tells us something that is lost when all dashes are reduced to a single piece of type in print. Look at the long dash in line 8, for example. Why such length? Read on in the novel. It anticipates ‘opening the door as he spoke’.

  You won’t see many dashes in the published book. We’d expect a publisher to do a certain amount of polishing, such as removing handwritten abbreviations (& vs and), correcting spelling mistakes (recieve), and ensuring house-style consistency (judgment vs judgement); but what Austen’s editor did was far more radical. As Sutherland points out in Jane Austen’s Textual Lives (2005), the manuscripts were normalized either by an editor at her publisher’s (John Murray) or by a corrector in the printing-house. New paragraphing is introduced. Sentence construction is changed to follow prescriptive norms. Gone are her rhetorical dashes and her use of initial capitals on common nouns. And there is a huge amount of repunctuation, as seen in Sutherland’s comparison of a section of manuscript in Austen’s hand and the final text as it was printed.

  Mrs. Clay’s affections had overpowered her Interest, & she had sacrificed for the Young Man’s sake, the possibility of scheming longer for Sir Walter;--she has Abilities however as well as Affections, and it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning or hers may finally carry the day, whether, after preventing her from being the wife of Sir Walter, he may not be wheedled & caressed at last into making her the wife of Sir William.---

  Mrs. Clay’s affections had overpowered her interest, and she had sacrificed, for the young man’s sake, the possibility of scheming longer for Sir Walter. She has abilities, however, as well as affections; and it is now a doubtful point whether his cunning, or hers, may finally carry the day; whether, after preventing her from being the wife of Sir Walter, he may not be wheedled and caressed at last into making her the wife of Sir William.

  Whoever corrected this is clearly under the influence of the heavy punctuational style recommended by the nineteenth-century grammarians I described in Chapter 8. And, as Sutherland points out, the process continued into the twentieth century, with subsequent editions reflecting later prescriptive preferences. For example, R W Chapman, whose five-volume edition appeared in 1923, considered the novels ‘under-punctuated’. Sutherland reports an instance when Chapman asked the Oxford English Dictionary editor Henry Bradley for advice about how to punctuate the phrase ‘a quick looking girl’ (describing Susan Price in Mansfield Park). Should he use a comma or a hyphen? Bradley’s response (a letter of 14 February 1922) is illuminating: do neither.

  Your alternatives of comma and hyphen imply different constructions, and I am not quite sure which is right, or whether the author may not have felt the collocation as something between the two … is it not possible that if we demand that it must be either comma or hyphen, we shall be insisting on a precision of grammatical analysis which punctuation has rendered instructive to readers of today, but which c1800 only a grammarian would be capable of?

  Chapman let Austen’s version stand in this instance; but in many other cases he implemented a policy, following the tradition going back to Lindley Murray, that punctuation exists to foster grammatical precision. And Sutherland concludes:

  he prepared a text which actively and misguidedly promoted Austen’s twentieth-century reputation as a conformant and prim stylistician.

  The issues now go well beyond the linguistic, and raise fundamental questions about the role of editorial intervention in literature, and what exactly we are studying when we analyse the linguistic choices encountered in a text. Austen is not an isolated case. Many other authors have had their punctuation emended in a similar way.

  In the case of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, we have an even more complex situation, as several printers were involved, and there is no surviving author’s manuscript. Defoe’s publisher, William Taylor, farmed the manuscript out to a printer, Henry Parker, and the first edition appeared on 25 April 1719. Demand was so great that a second edition was required, and this was set in a hurry by three different printers, appearing two weeks later. A month later, there were two further editions set by the same three printers, and two more in August set by Parker alo
ne. The textual variations introduced by the printers are an editorial nightmare for anyone trying to establish a version that comes closest to what Defoe intended. And variations in punctuation, according to Evan R Davies, the editor of the Broadview 2010 edition, are most frequent of all. He writes:

  To a reader accustomed to twenty-first grammatical conventions, the first edition of Robinson Crusoe can seem hopelessly mispunctuated, replete with fragmented clauses, run-on sentences, capricious commas.

  He illustrates with a short comparison:

  1st edition

  6th edition

  I consulted several Things in my Situation which I found would be proper for me, 1st. Health, and fresh Water I just now mention’d, 2dly. Shelter from the Heat of the Sun, 3dly. Security from ravenous Creatures, whether Men or Beasts, …

  I consulted several Things in my Situation which I found would be proper for me, 1st. Health, and fresh Water I just now mention’d. 2ndly, Shelter from the Heat of the Sun. 3dly, Security from ravenous Creatures, whether Man or Beast. …

  Apart from the lexical changes (such as Men to Man), we see a grammatical punctuation replacing the rhetorical style. However, there is nothing ‘capricious’ about it. Both versions are systematic, but the later edition shows the clear influence of a printer wishing to make a text conform to the rules as laid down in the grammars of the time.

  Those who have edited the few surviving manuscripts in Defoe’s hand have noted a highly individual style, with idiosyncratic abbreviations and little punctuation. Davies generally keeps the punctuation of the first edition except where ‘the meaning of the prose is seriously undermined’, in which case he uses the punctuation of later editions. And, crucially, he gives a list of these changes – an eminently desirable practice that ought to be followed universally. For example, on p. 51, we read: