Eats, Shoots & Leaves (15 page)

But after journeying through the world of punctuation, and seeing what it can do, I am all the more convinced we should fight like tigers to preserve our punctuation, and we should start now. Who wants a blank map, for heaven’s sake? There is more at stake than the way people read and write. Note the way the
Washington Post
news story explained the benefits of emailing: it “increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day
because they took less time to formulate their thoughts
”. If we value the way we have been trained to think by centuries of absorbing the culture of the printed word, we must not allow the language to return to the chaotic
scriptio continua
swamp from which it so bravely crawled less than two thousand years ago. We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and allusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we
bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

One of the best descriptions of punctuation comes in a book entitled
The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist
(1989) by Thomas McCormack. He says the purpose of punctuation is “to tango the reader into the pauses, inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey”:

Punctuation to the writer is like anatomy to the artist: He learns the rules so he can knowledgeably and controllédly depart from them as art requires. Punctuation is a means, and its end is: helping the reader to hear, to follow.

And here’s a funny thing. If all these high moral arguments have had no effect, just remember that ignorance of punctuation can have rather large practical repercussions in the real world. In February 2003 a Cambridge politics lecturer named Glen Rangwala received a copy of the British government’s most recent dossier on Iraq. He quickly
recognised in it the wholesale copying of a twelve-year-old thesis by American doctoral student Ibrahim al-Marashi, “reproduced word for word, misplaced comma for misplaced comma”. Oh yes. Rangwala noticed there were some changes to the original, such as the word “terrorists” substituted for “opposition groups”, but otherwise much of it was identical. In publishing his findings, he wrote:

Even the typographical errors and anomalous uses of grammar are incorporated into the Downing Street document. For example, Marashi had written:

“Saddam appointed, Sabir ’Abd al-’Aziz al-Duri as head” . . .

Note the misplaced comma. The UK officials who used Marashi’s text hadn’t. Thus, on page 13, the British dossier incorporates the same misplaced comma:

“Saddam appointed, Sabir ’Abd al-’Aziz al-Duri as head” . . .

So we ignore the rules of punctuation at our political peril as well as to our moral detriment. When Sir Roger Casement was “hanged on a comma” all those years ago, who would have
thought a British government would be rumbled on a comma (and a “yob’s comma”, at that) ninety years further down the line? Doesn’t it feel good to know this, though? It does. It really does.

Robert Allen,
Punctuation
, Oxford University Press, 2002

Kingsley Amis,
The King’s English: a guide to modern usage
, HarperCollins, 1997

Anon,
A Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, and of notes which are used in Writing and Print
, 1680

Tim Austin,
The Times Guide to English Style and Usage
, Times Books, 1999

Nicholson Baker, “The History of Punctuation”, in
The Size of Thoughts
, Chatto & Windus, 1996

—
Room Temperature
, Granta Books, 1990

Sven Birkerts,
The Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age
, Ballantine, 1994

Bill Bryson,
Mother Tongue: the English language
, Hamish Hamilton, 1990

—
Troublesome Words
, third edition, Viking, 2001

R. W. Burchfield,
The New Fowler’s Modern English
Usage
, revised third edition, Oxford University Press, 1998

Rene J. Cappon,
The Associated Press Guide to Punctuation
, Perseus Publishing, 2003

G. V. Carey,
Mind the Stop: a brief guide to punctuation with a note on proof-correction
, Cambridge University Press, 1939

—
Punctuation
, Cambridge University Press, 1957

David Crystal,
Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
, Cambridge University Press, 1995

—
Language and the Internet
, Cambridge University Press, 2001

Kay Cullen (ed.),
Chambers Guide to Punctuation
, Chambers, 1999

H. W. Fowler,
The King’s English
, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1906

Karen Elizabeth Gordon,
The New Well-Tempered Sentence: a punctuation handbook for the innocent, the eager, and the doomed
, Houghton Mifflin, 1993

Ernest Gowers,
Plain Words: a guide to the use of English
, HMSO, 1948

Cecil Hartley,
Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing
, 1818

Philip Howard,
The State of the Language: English observed
, Hamish Hamilton, 1984

F. T. Husband and M. F. A. Husband,
Punctuation, its Principles and Practice
, Routledge, 1905

Ben Jonson,
English Grammar
, 1640

Graham King,
Punctuation
, HarperCollins, 2000

Thomas McCormack,
The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist
, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1989

John McDermott,
Punctuation for Now
, Macmillan, 1990

Malcolm Parkes,
Pause and Effect: an introduction to the history of punctuation in the West
, Scolar Press, 1992

Eric Partridge,
Usage and Abusage: a guide to good English
, Hamish Hamilton, 1947

—
You Have a Point There
, Hamish Hamilton, 1953

Joseph Robertson,
An Essay on Punctuation
, 1785

Paul A. Robinson, “The Philosophy of Punctuation”, in
Opera, Sex, and Other Vital Matters
, Chicago University Press, 2002

Paul Saenger,
Space between Words: the origins of silent reading
, Stanford University Press, 1997

Reginald Skelton,
Modern English Punctuation
, Pitman, 1933

Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, in
Look at Me Now and Here I Am: writings and lectures 1911–45
, Peter Owen, 1967 (reissue imminent)

William Strunk and E. B. White,
The Elements of Style
, fourth edition, Longman, 2000

Abraham Tauber (ed.),
George Bernard Shaw on Language
, Peter Owen, 1965

James Thurber,
The Years with Ross
, Hamish Hamilton, 1959

James Thurber (eds. Helen Thurber and Edward Weeks),
Selected Letters of James Thurber
, Hamish Hamilton, 1982

Loreto Todd,
Cassell’s Guide to Punctuation
, Cassell & Co., 1995

R. L. Trask,
The Penguin Guide to Punctuation
, Penguin, 1997

William Vandyck,
Punctuation Repair Kit
, Hodder Headline, 1996

Bill Walsh,
Lapsing into a Comma: a curmudgeon’s guide to the many things that can go wrong in print – and how to avoid them
, Contemporary Books, 2000

Keith Waterhouse,
English Our English (and How to Sing It)
, Viking, 1991

—
Sharon & Tracy & the Rest: the best of Keith
Waterhouse in the Daily Mail
, Hodder & Stoughton, 1992

—
Waterhouse on Newspaper Style
, Viking, 1989

*
He shot, himself, as a child.

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Originally published in Great Britain in 2003 by Profile Books, Ltd.
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