Most punctuation marks describe sounds or silences. They are attempts to replicate in writing things that we do naturally when speaking. They tell you when to stop and start: the short pause of a comma; the longer pause of a full stop. Or they tell you what sort of noise to make: the rising inflexion of a question mark; the declamatory emphasis of an exclamation mark. Such simple jobs, yet they generate complex emotions that can approach the level of neurosis.
If you are someone who struggles to use “correct” punctuation, then there might be some good news for you. If you are one of the shrinking number who agonise over the placement of a comma or the etiquette around brackets, you might want to stop reading now.
Because a lot of what we consider essential punctuation is a relatively modern invention, not really that essential and showing signs of being on the way out.
Berlin-based scholar Florence Hazrat, the author of An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! and at work on a social history of punctuation, has a very broad definition. “It’s more than a dot and a question mark,” she says. “It’s also font, typeface, bolding, paragraphs, spaces. Generally, organisation of text on the page can be seen as punctuation. Capitalisation, for example, organises how the eyes move, and white space is super important.”
Writing for the digital magazine Aeon, Hazrat noted: “Writing without punctuation (or spaces) actually lasted for many hundreds of years.” Before printed texts and silent reading, the job of any punctuation was to guide people when reading aloud. “Any marks that were inserted served to indicate where to pause.”
It was even believed good punctuation could help you to live longer. “In the 16th and 17th centuries,” says Hazrat, when people mainly read aloud, it was thought that “reading is good for your health, because you exercise your breath”.
She says one of punctuation’s virtues is that, contrary to much popular advice, it makes us sweat the small stuff. “And that’s what I really love, especially today, where image after image [is bombarding us]. It makes us attend to small things. I think it does something to our makeup.”
Punctuation is the table manners of language – an act of courtesy that makes life more pleasant for those around us. Just as it’s polite not to display the contents of your mouth when chewing, it’s considerate to show people how to read what we write by indicating, for instance, when the sentences stop and start.
University of Auckland associate professor Susan Carter, co-author of the guidebook Punc Rocks: Foundation Stones for Precise Punctuation, agrees that punctuation is politeness. “Treat your reader with aroha, with courtesy. You should be thinking, ‘What don’t they know that I’m assuming [they do know] and not telling them? And have I made it easy for them to get into this thing I’m doing?’”
Carter says her book and related activities she organised at the university filled an obvious academic need. “I decided to have punctuation festivals, because I realised people don’t know how to do this, and they’re in a system where you are judged quite harshly by whether you can do it or not.” A colleague told Carter she was weird, but “quite a few students came over saying, ‘I’ve always wanted to know about this.’”
Trifecta of teaching
Someone who has almost always known about this is Auckland subeditor of nigh-on half a century’s experience, Rod Pascoe. He learnt his punctuation from “the trifecta: the Sisters of Mercy, the Marist Brothers, and the New Zealand Herald subs bench. In the era of education that I passed through, teachers still marked all errors, so you learnt from that. Consistent correction helped me to acquire an in-depth knowledge of the importance of punctuation, expression and clarity of thought.”
But Pascoe lives and works in the real world and understands the contemporary forces at play. That usual suspect, money, is responsible for changing standards. “In journalism generally,” says Pascoe, “and particularly in daily journalism, with the slashing of staff due to falling revenue the standards have slipped.”
He recalls a time when there were many levels of checking and proofreading between the writer and the reader. Now, writers often send their work straight to a website, untouched by any other human hands [editor’s note: this does not happen at listener.co.nz].
“When I got to the Herald, we had this wonderful team of subs, and they had the time to show people what was wrong in terms of punctuation and expression. Those subs who have employment in the daily media today are just too busy to report back to young journos and explain what’s wrong.”
Outside the formerly rigid constraints of daily journalism, there has been acceptance of punctuation that is more personally expressive than formally prescribed.
For Hazrat, the exclamation mark is a flexible instrument that can be bent to the user’s will: “My Italian friends are very happy to have strings of exclamation marks. It expresses enthusiasm, friendliness, amazement. I wanted to write a manifesto against judgment of this particular mark.
“And I wanted to encourage people to not be so particular about grammar and punctuation. I think it’s important to still learn rules, but to be really aware that these rules are conventions.
“Right now, we are changing the conventions, and that’s fine. I just think it’s important to know what we’re changing, and how we’re changing it and why.”
Polarising marks
Sooner or later, most discussions about punctuation come back to the most polarising mark of all: the semi-colon. “Transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing,” sputtered novelist Kurt Vonnegut, choosing words that reveal his limitations in other areas. The mark is seen as pretentious and shunned by many, but as Pascoe observes, “It can’t be pretentious if it’s used correctly. I think most people have given up using it for fear of using it incorrectly.” Semi-colon shaming is real and has left the field clear for the mark to function as punctuational virtue signalling at its worst, used only by those who belong to a special club.
However, signalling membership of one club or another is among punctuation’s core functions. Geoff McLay is co-founder and editor of the New Zealand Law Style Guide, first published in 2009, which filled a gap by bringing some consistency of punctuation to the way lawyers cite precedents and cases.
“One of the important parts of being a lawyer is being able to show that you belong,” says McLay. “Style and punctuation are a way of saying that you understand the rules, and you’re fit to practise.”
In the field of law, it turns out, the most contentious bit of punctuation is “the difference between round brackets and square brackets. This is an absolute must. This is the first thing we teach law students.” At the risk of oversimplifying, if you put a year in square brackets, it means one thing; if you put it in round brackets, it means another. If you can’t bring yourself to care, a career in the law is probably not for you.
Either way, you will be judged – sometimes by actual judges. Punctuation is extremely good at enabling people to pass judgment. One of the reasons Hazrat wrote her book on exclamation marks was that “I wanted to rehabilitate punctuation in general, and take us away from [judging] others based on how they punctuate or how they spell.” Using the exclamation mark in particular tended to draw fire from those who saw it as a low-rent, cheap shocker of a mark.
Many publications have banned its use over the years, and even Hazrat concedes, “Would I be a bit surprised if I read an exclamation mark on the website of the BBC? Probably. But that’s just because we have a convention that that’s not what you do if you’re serious. These really are conventions and they’re historical; they’re not inherent in language.”
Tech threat
Paradoxically, although we evolve and improve what we do in other areas, such as diet, exercise, parenting and so much else, when it comes to punctuation, many people advocate doing something a certain way because that’s how we’ve always done it.
But technology has other plans, and it is changing at speed the way punctuation is used. Most of these effects – sorry, traditionalists – will happen whether you like them or not. And they stem from the fact that in a digital world, people are writing more than ever. Whether it’s in the form of work emails, personal emails, texts, social-media posts, comments on websites, requests for information on company websites or numerous other forms, we are all writers now.
“Digitalisation and smartphone technology is a revolution in so many ways, but also in the organisation of text,” says Hazrat. One example: if you text, “That’s amazing!”, you will almost automatically use an exclamation mark; if you text, “That’s amazing”, without the exclamation mark, it looks like you’re being sarcastic, because you have withheld that extra bit of enthusiasm.
Pascoe is not happy about it. “I just despair sometimes when I see emails, texts, and social-media posts where folk have not even the most basic knowledge. It’s like the reader has to infer what the writer of the text is trying to get across.” Bad manners, indeed.
Technology’s two-edged sword is its speed. It’s great that we can do things so much faster, but that means we don’t have as much time to do them. At the back of our minds is the feeling that punctuation just slows us down. But, notes Pascoe, “the beauty of working in digital media is that you can quickly go back and correct something”, even after it has been published.
Just as we use different language with friends or family or workmates, we can use different dots and dashes whether communicating in formal writing, social media or other forms.
“Young people have their own codes,” says Susan Carter. “A lot of how you write is based on the subculture you’re identifying with. There’s text-messaging language, and different rules for different audiences.”
Hazrat is sure we will cope with parallel systems of punctuation. “As long as we teach with actual books, and you get grammatical teaching at school with texts the way they’ve looked for many hundreds of years, then people can manage changes online. For example, that we don’t use full stops in texting; we just send the text message off.”
Wait – what? Many people, it seems, use one text bubble per sentence. “So why should I put a full stop [they think]? Technically, the full stop doesn’t mean anything except stop – pause here or breathe. So if we have the box doing that visually, then we don’t need the full stop. People are super adept at navigating the different forms of writing.”
But Hazrat is not an anything-goes monster, warning that “if we shift our entire lives online, that’s more worrisome. Things could change in a way that [would be] difficult to stop.”
And here is where her broad definition of punctuation comes into play. “There have been studies showing that the emotion you feel is less intense, or you are less involved in the character, when you read online with a Kindle rather than when you have an actual book in your hand. In terms of punctuation, I think it’s about how attention flows.”
She cites news websites that give every sentence a paragraph. “But that’s not a paragraph. A paragraph is a chunk of sentences [connected into a larger unit of meaning].” As we get more used to scrolling for reading, our ability to focus our attention is affected, and not for the better.
Save the Apostrophe
Some believe the various different kinds of punctuation will converge into one post-digital variety. One of the first punctuation marks to go will most likely be the apostrophe, a relatively straightforward wee mark that many people struggle to use “correctly”. The bottom line – which will probably be reached within 100 years – is that it will disappear altogether. We managed just fine without it for centuries, and occasions when the absence of an apostrophe will lead to catastrophic ambiguity or obscurity are hard to imagine. Shakespeare – or his typesetters – sometimes used them and sometimes did not. But if we talk about Hamlets soliloquy, no one thinks we are talking about more than one Hamlet.
One reason for disliking apostrophes is the sort of dubious supporters it attracts – smug sorts who crow about fruit-shop signs advertising “Avocado’s $1″ or “Mushrooms’ $3 a kilo”. Hazrat mentions the Apostrophe Protection Society, founded in 2001 by Englishman John Richards, who closed it down 18 years later, when he was aged 96, saying “ignorance and laziness” – presumably not his own – were to blame for its failure. It has since been revived, and its website offers guidance on usage, closely followed by instructions on where to send your sneering photos of hilariously misplaced apostrophes.
(There was a small victory recently for the plucky apostrophe in England, home of the eponymous language. In November, the residents of the village of Twyford won the right to restore the punctuation mark to the name of St Mary’s Terrace, despite the official naming body having a policy of removing punctuation from all new signage.)
Hazrat is diffident about the likes of the society. “I do think the apostrophe is still very useful because we have this distinction between possessives. Is it plural, or is it singular? But I don’t really care what people do around taking photographs of fruit-shop signs.”
Her father was from Iran, and Hazrat is also interested in the often overlooked political implications of punctuation, notably in the Arab world, where we can see patterns that have echoes in Aotearoa New Zealand.
“French [colonising] of the Maghreb brought political oppression and linguistic dominance,” she writes on her website. “So much so that Arab writers and thinkers would publish and exchange with each other in French. People saw this as another kind of invasion, magnified by the slow, ponderous nature of Arabic.” In reaction, “writers introduced punctuation marks into Arabic around the turn of the 19th-20th century in order to subvert what they saw as the domineering influence of French. The motivation was both political and social, since easier reading also [meant] widening the circle of textual participation to non-scholars.”
Embracing the macron
The use of macrons when writing words in te reo Māori has been widely adopted here, with much less controversy than such bare-faced wokeness might have been expected to inspire. Having supplanted the doubling of vowels, with notable exceptions among iwi such as Waikato Tainui, it makes it easier for the reader to pronounce them correctly.
It is remarkable that the macron has been so quickly accepted into pieces of writing that are predominantly in English, such as this one, even though it is not otherwise used in the language. It shows a developing relationship between two languages; not one language dominating another. It’s another case in which the relationship between punctuation and power can be seen, just as it was in the Arab world.
Jeff Rubin, founder of National Punctuation Day in the US (see “Punc crusaders”, below), says Donald Trump once made an ambiguous remark that showed, perhaps unconsciously, that the then US presidential candidate recognised the connection between power and punctuation.
Asked if he thinks there are cases where people avoid punctuating correctly because it makes them look elitist, Rubin recalls, “When he was running for president in 2016, somebody made a similar comment to Trump. And his response to that was, ‘I love the uneducated.’”
Punc Crusader
Jeff Rubin is a former newspaper journalist and the founder, in 2004, of National Punctuation Day, not an officially recognised US government holiday but registered with Chase’s Calendar of Events and an opportunity for Rubin and his wife, Norma, to get out every September 24 and fly the flag for commas and colons.
Rubin, who lives in Pinole, California, began it, he says, because “I was very frustrated with the state of poor punctuation, bad spelling, bad grammar, in American newspapers. I would read the local paper and circle all the mistakes with a red marker. And when I was done, it looked like I had popped a vein, and bled all over the paper.”
Inclusion in Chase’s Calendar meant he could spread the word – or the bits between words – because “journalists like you see it and call me for interviews”. He has been featured in the likes of the New Yorker and on CNN.
He and his wife also developed a programme for schools where “we dressed up in costumes. We both had shirts with a punctuation mark on it. I had a cape, and kind of looked like Superman”. And they had quizzes and activities such as Punctuation Playtime, which was an hour of games like “pin the punctuation mark on the sentence” followed by discussions on why punctuation was important. Kids went wild. So did some teachers.
It all matters to Rubin because he believes punctuation is essential: “Punctuation is the key to expressing yourself successfully with written words, as opposed to expressing yourself verbally.”