MISCELLANEOUS

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1. Found in a major nineteenth century novel, New Grub Street by George Gissing, published in 1891. In this section Biffen is endeavouring to teach a mature student, while Biffen's friend Reardon looks on.

'Now do endeavour to write in shorter sentences,' said Biffen, who sat down beside him and resumed the lesson, Reardon having taken up a volume. 'This isn't bad - it isn't bad at all. I assure you; but you have put all you had to say into three appalling periods, whereas you ought to have made about a dozen.'
'There it is; there it is!' exclaimed the man, smoothing his wiry hair. 'I can't break it up. The thoughts come in a lump, if I may say so. To break it up - there's the art of compersition.'

2 The problematic apostrophe

The article in the Manchester Metro News of March 31st 1994, began:

An astonishing plea for a ban on the apostrophe has come from a top Manchester university professor. Professor Richard Hogg, head of the university's English department, wants the most puzzling punctuation mark in the English language to be abolished.'

The difficulty of the apostrophe was put to the test by the Metro News reporter who stopped six people and asked them to punctuate six sentences*. Not one of the six people scored top marks! The response to Professor Hogg's views (who by the way is not from the university in which The Punctuation Project is based) drew one of the largest ever postal responses. Virtually every correspondent disagreed with Professor Hogg.

While Professor Hogg's views might have outraged many readers, he was voicing a sentiment that has been expressed for many times since the introduction of the mark into English during the sixteenth century. That there is some room for disagreement about the apostrophe is indicated in a short note published recently in the diary column of The Independent newspaper. It told how a well-established London club, 'The Travellers' Club', has finally bowed to the wishes of its founding committee of 1819 and removed its apostrophe. It is now 'The Travellers Club'. Some time between 1895 and 1902 Harrod's became Harrods and Lloyd's bank became Lloyds Bank. In 1891 the US Board of Geographic names called for an end to possessive forms in place names, a move which was largely successful.

No problems with the apostrophe were experienced by the owner of a restaurant at the foot of one of Jersey's beaches. His chalked menu unequivocally offered 'fish, chip's and pea's'.

* The six (uncorrected) sentences were:

1 The dog has lost its ball.

2 Its a lovely sunny day.

3 Thats Pauls book isnt it?

4 Lets get the MPs involved.

5 Good choice of womens clothes.

6 Boys shirts at bargain prices.

We will not insult you by providing the corrected sentences or by questioning whether they are all 'sentences'.

3 Ten curious facts about punctuation

1. In Roman times, authors did not punctuate their texts. ''The marking of pauses in a copy of a text was normally left to the initiative of the individual reader who would insert them or not according to the degree of difficulty presented by the text, or the extent of his comprehension.'' (M.B. Parkes 1992)
2. Punctuation first began to be added to texts because of declining standards of literacy. Readers had become less able to indicate their own punctuation.
3. Up until the nineteenth century punctuation was known as 'pointing'.
4. In Spanish, as in English a question is marked by a question mark. However, the Spanish place an inverted question mark at the beginning of a sentence and a usual question mark at the end.
5. Up until about the eighth century writers did not even insert spaces between their words.
6. Until recently most legal documents had no punctuation at all.
7. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century the punctuation appearing in printed texts was usually determined by the printer rather than the author.
8. In the United States a 'full stop' is called a 'period'.
9. The standardisation of marks was determined by the resources available to the printer and the emergence of specialist type founders led to the widespread use of particular type faces in different parts of Europe. (M.B.Parkes 1992)
10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, and Charlotte Bronte all asked their respective publishers to correct the punctuation in their manuscripts.

4 A collection of quotable quotes about punctuation.

Many writers profess great exactness in punctuation, who never yet made a point. (George Prentice)

If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad. (Anonymous)

The use of commas cannot be learned by rule. (Ernest Gowers)

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Anyone who can improve a sentence of mine by the omission or placing of a comma is looked upon as my dearest friend. (George Moore)

All morning I worked on the proof of one of my poems, and took out a comma; in the afternoon I put it back. (Oscar Wilde)

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. (Truman Capote)

Great care ought to be had in writing, for the due observing of points: for, the neglect thereof will pervert the sence. (Richard Hodges)

Intellectually, stops matter a great deal. If you are getting your commas, semi-colons, and full stops wrong, it means that you are not getting your thoughts right, and your mind is muddled. (Archbishop William Temple)

When punctuation was first employed, it was in the role of the handmaid of prose; later the handmaid was transformed by the pedants into a harsh-faced chaperone, pervertedly ingenious in the contriving of stiff regulations and starched rules of decorum; now, happily, she is content to act as an auxiliary to the writer and as a guide to the reader. (Harold Herd)

5 Some definitions of punctuation.

Punctuation: The practice, art, method, or system of inserting points or ''stops'' to aid the sense, in writing or printing. (The Shorter Oxford Dictionary)

Punctuation, then, is the use of spacing, conventional signs and certain typographical devices to promote understanding and to guide correct reading, whether silent or aloud. (John McDermott)

Pointing is the disposal of speech into certain members for more articulate and distinct reading and circumstantiating of writs and papers. It rests wholly and solely on concordance, and necessitates a knowledge of grammar. (Robert Monteith)

Punctuation is the art of dividing a written composition into sentences, or parts of sentences, by points or stops, for the purpose of marking the different pauses which the sense, and an accurate pronunciation require. (Lindley Murray)

Its primary function is to resolve structural uncertainties in a text, and to signal nuances of semantic significance which might otherwise not be conveyed at all, or would at best be much more difficult for a reader to figure out. (Malcolm Parkes)