PUNCTUATION

the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading, both silently and aloud, of handwritten and printed texts. The word is derived from the Latin punctus, point. From the 15th century to the early 18th the subject was known in English as pointing; and the term punctuation, first recorded in the middle of the 16th century, was reserved for the insertion of vowel points (marks placed near consonants to indicate preceding or following vowels) in Hebrew texts. The two words exchanged meanings between 1650 and 1750. Since the late 16th century the theory and practice of punctuation have varied between two main schools of thought: the elocutionary school, following late medieval practice, treated points or stops as indications of the pauses of various lengths that might be observed by a reader, particularly when he was reading aloud to an audience; the syntactical school, which had won the argument by the end of the 17th century, saw them as something less arbitrary, namely, as guides to the grammatical construction of sentences. Pauses in speech and breaks in syntax tend in any case to coincide; and although English-speaking writers are now agreed that the main purpose of punctuation is to clarify the grammar of a text, they also require it to take account of the speed and rhythm of actual speech. Syntactical punctuation is, by definition, bad when it obscures rather than clarifies the construction of sentences. Good punctuation, however, may be of many kinds: to take two extreme examples, Henry James would be unintelligible without his numerous commas, but Ernest Hemingway seldom needs any stop but the period. In poetry, in which the elocutionary aspect of punctuation is still important, and to a lesser degree in fiction, especially when the style is close to actual speech, punctuation is much at the author's discretion. In nonfictional writing there is less room for experiment. Stimulating variant models for general use might be the light punctuation of George Bernard Shaw's prefaces to his plays and the heavier punctuation of T.S. Eliot's literary and political essays. a standard set of signs, spaces, and various typographical devices in written and printed texts that are used to make meaning clear and to separate elements of sentences, words, or parts of words. Punctuation is the conventional practice of pointing a written composition so as to divide it into sentences and portions of sentences; it is also used to point words (as in hyphenation, in apostrophizing, or in the use of periods marking abbreviations). Punctuation may indicate what would in speech be pauses or changes of expression, but punctuation may also be a purely conventional typographical device, unrelated to pauses or intonation patterns. In English, the full stop or period (.) marks the end of a sentence. The colon (:) is at the transition point of the sentence. The semicolon (;) separates different clauses, or statements. The comma (,) separates clauses, phrases, and particles. The terms period, colon, and comma were borrowed from the Greek grammarians, who originally described either the whole sentence or a part of it in this way. The dash () marks abruptness or irregularity. The exclamation (!) marks surprise. The interrogation or query (?) asks a question. The apostrophe (') marks elisions or the possessive case. Quotes, quotation marks, or inverted commas ( ) define either quoted words or words used with special emphasis or significance. Interpolations in a sentence are marked by various forms of bracket or parenthesis (). Usage and practice vary widely, however. In the earlier forms of European writing the letters ran on continuously in lines; only by degrees were words divided up by spacing within the line; later came the distribution into sentences by points and the introduction by Aldus Manutius (16th century) of a regular system for these. The chief signs were derived from the dots of the Greek grammarians, but these have often changed meanings; thus the Greek interrogation mark (;) became the English semicolon. Additional reading G.V. Carey, Mind the Stop, rev. ed. (1958, reissued 1976); and E.H. Partridge, You Have a Point There: A Guide to Punctuation and Its Allies (1953, reissued 1978), are the best guides to modern punctuation as practiced in Britain; the latter is more exhaustive and includes a chapter on American practice by John W. Clark. A comparable American work is the chapter on punctuation in Wilma R. Ebbitt and David R. Ebbitt, Writer's Guide and Index to English, 6th ed. (1978). The following describe the practices of two famous presses, Oxford University Press and the University of Chicago Press: Horace Hart, Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford, 39th ed. rev. (1983); and A Manual of Style: For Authors, Editors and Copywriters, 13th ed. rev. (1982). For punctuation in antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Franz Steffens, Lateinische Palographie, 2nd ed. (1907, reissued 1964); and Peter Clemoes, Liturgical Influence on Punctuation in Late Old English and Early Middle English Manuscripts (1952). For punctuation in and since the Renaissance, especially in Britain, see the relevant sections in A.C. Partridge, Orthography in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama: A Study of Colloquial Contractions, Elision, Prosody, and Punctuation (1964); and T.F. Husband and M.F.A. Husband, Punctuation: Its Principles and Practice (1905). Alexander Bieling, Das Princip der deutschen Interpunktion: Nebst einer bersichtlichen Darstellung ihrer Geschichte (1880), is useful for German and for European punctuation in general since the 15th century.