Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation by David Crystal.
Oscar Wilde: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
Mark Twain: “what is one man’s comma is another man’s colon. One man can’t punctuate another manuscript any more than one person can make the gestures for another person’s speech.”
See “Pragmatic tolerance”, Chapter 34, p. 342.
David Crystal’s approach to punctuation is that a pragmatic approach is preferable to “zero tolerance”. He refers to Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves .
Crystal opines: “it is not possible to be zero tolerant about a linguistic system that contains so much uncertainty”. Much depends upon genre preferences and personal taste.
Punctuation is individual, shifting and unpredictable. “We hope to find clear-cut rules and instead find tendencies, trends, and fashions.”
Despite the numerous differences, “the best we can do is identify norms, plot trends, emphasize the need for personal consistency and be very cautious indeed about making generalizations.”
He notes that his pragmatic approach “respects this reality, and tries to come to terms with it.”
Being pragmatic means “respecting all linguistic realities, whether rule-based or not.”
Punctuation is a system; it is hierarchical in character and offers a fixed number of choices at each level. Taste is not necessarily “idiosyncratic”. It has to do with “functions rather than forms”. Much depends upon the function and effectiveness of a text.
The use of standard punctuation affects an author’s social credibility or career prospects.
Punctuation aids swift comprehension. It helps writers to organise their thoughts on the page, and it helps readers to process continuous text with a minimum of discomfort.
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