Punctuation

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 syntactic 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 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.

Syntactic 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.