Making a Point
Page 12
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:
Future meetings It is proposed to hold meetings at intervals of three weeks during the first part of the year …
It’s a style especially used when there are already several other headings in the document, and the writer doesn’t want to give such prominence to an item of relatively minor importance.
This last example shows how paragraphing, the second level of the punctuation hierarchy, interacts with the levels on either side of it. If the writer decides nonetheless to treat the information as sections, it would appear like this:
Future meetings
It is proposed to hold meetings at intervals of three weeks during the first part of the year …
Here the interaction is with the level above: the choice is between sectioning or paragraphing. And there is also a possible interaction with the level below, for it might have been written like this:
Future meetings. It is proposed to hold meetings at intervals of three weeks during the first part of the year …
This kind of additional pointing is a feature of older or conservative writing styles. We see a colon following the paragraph opener in, for example, Hansard reports of debates in the House of Lords:
Lord Quirk: My Lords, in this interesting debate …
Why the extra mark when the typography would do the job just as well? To answer this, we must turn to the third level in the punctuation hierarchy: the period.
16
Periods, period.
You would have thought that the oldest of all punctuation marks would have had its name settled by now. But this one still has alternatives: is it a stop, a full stop, a point, a full point, a period? Ben Jonson called it a prick. I have some sympathy.
There are regional differences. British English traditionally prefers full stop; American English prefers period. In both cases, the term has entered the spoken language. In the days when people read telegrams aloud, the constituent sentences would be separated by the word ‘stop’. Americans frequently say that ‘something is the case – period.’ Printers prefer point, continuing the Latinate tradition in describing punctuation, where the term was punctus, and this term was often used in earlier centuries, as we’ve seen. But we also need to talk about pointing, referring to the whole system of marks, so this can be confusing. The US usage of period has spread further than any of the others. It’s the term found in the appendix on punctuation by the authors of the (UK-published) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), which I use as my primary reference for all things grammatical. So I’ll follow that practice in this book from now on.
The chief function of the period is to mark separation. Writers in antiquity recognized this when they used a dot to separate words and larger units (the interpunct). In modern English, we see it operating both towards the top and at the bottom of the punctuation hierarchy, and it has a subtle presence in most of the other separating marks – we see it within the form of the question mark, exclamation, semicolon, and colon. Even the comma can be thought of as a period with a tail.
In modern typesetting, other methods are also available to perform a separating function. A change of typeface from roman to bold or italic will do the job just as well. This is the issue raised at the end of the previous chapter. It’s semantically tautologous to use both boldface and a period to separate the heading from the following text in this example:
Future meetings. It is proposed to hold meetings at intervals of three weeks during the first part of the year …
The modern principle is to avoid graphic tautology: don’t use two conventions when one would do. Use the fewest possible marks to make your meaning clear. However, publishers and writers of a conservative temperament – such as one imagines would be influential in the House of Lords – will incline towards the heavy punctuation of an earlier era, where graphic tautology was often extreme, as in the multiple use of quotation marks illustrated on p. 66. When asked to justify such a usage, both pragmatic and semantic arguments will be heard. A pragmatic argument might focus on aesthetics (‘it looks nicer’) or heritage (‘it’s always been that way’). A semantic argument will very likely focus on legibility (‘easier to read’) or clarity (‘reinforces the link between the heading and what follows’). I found myself torn in exactly this way during the copy-editing argument I described on p. 113, though in the end I let pragmatics overrule semantics.
At the bottom of the hierarchy, we see the separating force of the period operatin
g when we need to express the semantic unity of a sequence of numerals, as in times, dates, ages, money units, section numbers, decimals, act/scene/line divisions, and so on. The period allows us to distinguish between numerals with different values (such as hours vs minutes, or days vs months vs years):
6.40 pm
1.1.15 (1st January 2015)
1.6 years
£3.50
§1.3
3.007
IV.i.326
In electronic addresses, this separating use of the period (now renamed as ‘dot’) has extended to include the different elements making up a URL:
www.davidcrystal.com
I’ll discuss this further in a later chapter.
It’s important to note that the only function of the period in these cases is to separate, and as such it is sometimes replaced by any of the other marks that have a separating function. So we also see times written as 6:40 pm, section numbers as §1:3, ages as 1;6 years, and (in some countries) decimals as 3,007. English-speaking countries use the period to separate decimals, but it’s worth noting that there are some partial exceptions. Both period and comma are used in Canada, where English and French are official languages. And South Africa also adopted the comma as a decimal separator, though the period is widely used.
What’s interesting about this use of the period is that its separating function is unlike the one it has further up the hierarchy, where it separates sentences. At word and phrase level, it also acts to preserve the unity of the items it separates – that is, it has a linking function. We need all the separated elements to arrive at the correct semantic point: 1.1.15 refers to a particular day; §1.3 to a particular section. In this respect, the same function could be performed by the hyphen, and in informal writing we do sometimes see this. I’ve often seen dates scribbled out as 1-1-15, for example.
This ability of the period to simultaneously function as separator and linker is no longer present in its other low-level role – as a marker of abbreviation. Formerly, a period was an obligatory element in abbreviated words, so we find A.D., p.m., the B.B.C., and so on. Today, such pointing would rarely be seen: AD, BBC, and (as above) pm. It is another example of a pragmatic shift: rejecting what is perceived to be unnecessary graphic clutter – a general reflection of the ‘fussiness’ that modern business letter-writers are advised to avoid.
This is often said to be a late-twentieth-century trend, but in fact its roots go back much earlier, to a century before. In 1844, the printer John Wilson notes that some punctuators omit the period after abbreviations that retain the last letter, such as Mr and Mts. He comments: ‘Analogy, however, and reputable usage in a vast majority of cases, are alike opposed to the omission of this mark.’ But by 1880 reputable usage had changed. In 1880, Mark Twain wrote a piece for The Contributors’ Club, the final section of Volume 45 of The Atlantic Monthly. This is the famous essay in which he adumbrated the maxim that has since often been quoted: ‘Language was made for man, not man for language’, and in it he reflects on ‘the suppression of the period signifying abbreviation’:
Per cent is now common, and such forms as Mr, Dr, and Rev are receiving the sanction of use by writers who cannot be accused of either ignorance or carelessness.
A poet may safely, even creditably, call a gentleman a ‘gentle.’ ‘Gent.’ is a satisfactory term for genealogical purposes; why may we not go a step further, and omit the period?
A century on, and the omission of the period in all abbreviations is well on the way to becoming the norm, especially on the Internet, but there are still several variations in practice worldwide, and certain types of abbreviation are more likely to retain it (such as a.s.a.p.). Here, pragmatics rules: publishing houses and style guides opt for a solution, in the interests of aesthetics and consistency, and expect their users to follow it. But it is not easy predicting publishing preferences, and I have given up trying to do so. In a recent book I wrote for one publisher, periods were required for such abbreviations as eds (editors) and vols (volumes); in another, for a different publisher, they weren’t. Teachers of punctuation need to be aware of the huge diversity of practice, alert their charges to the variation that exists, and establish pragmatic guidelines of their own (especially, the importance of being consistent in a single piece of writing, and to watch out for cases where there may be potential ambiguity, such as No. vs no). The criteria used by examiners – whether sensible or not – will also be an influential pragmatic factor.
Higher up the punctuation hierarchy, the situation is much clearer. The period no longer has a role as a linker: its sole use is to separate sentences. This is its basic function, acknowledged in every punctuation manual I have read. Phrasing varies, but in all cases the period is said to be required at the end of a sentence to mark the completion of what the writer considers to be a unit of sense. Some traditional grammars would talk about a period marking a ‘complete thought’, but as one’s ‘thought’ (whatever that is) is often incomplete at the end of a sentence, or may extend over several sentences (as in the case of a paragraph), this fuzzy notion is generally avoided in modern treatments. It is taking me seven sentences to ‘complete’ the thought that motivated the present paragraph, for example. And if I were to rewrite my second sentence replacing the colon by a period, the amount of ‘thought’ in the paragraph would be the same, even though the number of sentences would have increased by one.
There is no fixed grammatical rule which tells us what a unit of sense is. Traditional grammars were desperate to find one, and would insist on such ‘rules’ as ‘a sentence must have a verb’ or ‘a sentence must have a subject and a predicate’. In certain kinds of writing – in formal monologues in particular – these rules are realistic and useful, as they draw writers’ attention to the need to make their thoughts explicit, in the absence of simultaneous feedback from a listener. But they are by no means universal. Pick up virtually any example of what is considered to be ‘best writing’ – novels, plays, poems … – and we see that units of sense ended by periods may contain any grammatical construction, whether including a verb or not.
Here’s the opening of a well-known novel: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. The units of sense are absolutely clear, regardless of the grammar they contain:
London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord
Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable
November weather.
The same thing happens in poetry. Here are the opening lines of Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Moonwalk’:
A glare chunk of moon.
The hill no colour
Under the polarized light.
Like a day pushed inside out. Everything
In negative.
And, as a third example: some lines from a play – Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Estragon asks Vladimir if he can remember what they asked Godot for:
VLADIMIR: Oh … nothing very definite.
ESTRAGON: A kind of prayer.
VLADIMIR: Precisely.
ESTRAGON: A vague supplication.
VLADIMIR: Exactly.
Again, the units of sense are clear, thanks to the use of the period, even though the grammatical structures are various and (in the last example) Vladimir’s responses are grammatically autonomous, unconnected to any ‘fuller’ previous sentence.
It’s important to appreciate that these examples are not ‘exceptions’. They are normal, and have been in the language since it began. Here’s another instance, in modern spelling:
I’m a hunter.
Whose?
The king’s.
This is an exchange from Ælfric’s Colloquy (see p. 11), a rare example of an Old English conversation, written around 1000 AD. We would find similar instances throughout the history of English literature, increasing in number as writers try to reflect more realistically the patterns and rhythms of everyday conversation. They all illustrate the perspective that is essential for understanding the use of the period: we do not thi
nk in the carefully articulated sentences recommended by traditional grammars. We think in units of sense, which are sometimes expressed through subjects and verbs, but just as often are not. Sentences are the way grammar enables us to express all these units of sense, whatever their structural constituency. And a period is the chief way of showing that we have reached the end of one of our units of sense.
The chief way, but not the only way. Using the systems approach I advocated in Chapter 13, if we want to understand the semantic and pragmatic functions of the period, we need to see how it operates as one of a set of options available to us when we reach the end of a unit of sense. If we don’t do this, we will end up making false generalizations about the period, such as the one I quoted at the beginning of that chapter: ‘there must be one at the end of every sentence.’ This is plainly not the case, as the following set of sentences illustrates. There are six options:
It’s time you went home.
It’s time you went home?
It’s time you went home!
It’s time you went home –
It’s time you went home …
It’s time you went home
Actually, there are more than six if we include at this point repeated instances such as
It’s time you went home!!!
It’s time you went home!?
But I’ll deal with those later.
The traditional classification of sentences as statements, questions, commands, and exclamations is important, but when used in relation to punctuation it clearly isn’t the whole story, for all these examples are grammatical statements, and yet they are punctuated differently. When would we use one and not the others? A complete semantic specification of all the contexts would take a book in itself, but an indication of the essential differences is as follows: