This week, I had a chat with a journalist from New Zealand who was writing about punctuation and its future. I noticed that we kept talking about the paragraph as unit of sense, and how it’s disappearing, because of the technology we’re using for reading and writing today. Most of us, for example, will encounter the news while on the go (waiting on the platform for a delayed train, or sitting on the toilet which is probably the best place to read about politics), so we’ll be using our phones for scrolling. On the small screen, lines bunch together, and a paragraph of 150 words that’s pretty regular on paper quickly seems like an unbearable Alps of text to wade through. News websites like the BBC have thus exploded the paragraph into a series of visually digestible one-liners. Here are the phone version and the desktop version of today’s goings-on Down Under:
Some of the chunks come across as paragraphs when one is one the phone, just because there are more words, but actually all of those units are a single sentence; two of the sentences are one-liners as becomes evident on the desktop picture to the right.
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News websites are not the only place online bleeding paragraphs: smartphone texting and social media messaging also have us shoot off strings of short messages one after the other, often doing away with capitalising the first word and finishing on a full stop. There’s no denying it: the paragraph is under threat. Its brother indentation is nearly extinct as we speak, barely lingering on in student essays and Charles Dickens book-bricks. There’s a lot to say about this phenomenon (and you can listen to my podcast session about it here), but for now I want to think about why paragraphing is part of punctuation. And what’s punctuation in the first place? Here’s your quick-and-dirty guide. Back to basics!
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Stop for a moment, and think about how many punctuation marks you remember from the top of your head. My guess is you’ll say full stop (or period in the US), comma, colon, semi-colon, question mark, exclamation mark, parentheses (round brackets), and dash. As grammar-fan you probably also remember the hyphen, angular brackets, curly braces, points of suspense… and that’s about it. This is our daily repertoire, and it does the trick. But there’s more. Much more.
We’ve got a whole arsenal of signs at our disposal that are neither words nor part of our everyday punctuation marks, mostly because we reserve them for special contexts such as emailing, tweeting, or researching. The asterisk and footnote, for example, send your eyes on a quest for more information elsewhere, but they’re not clarifying meaning within the sentence as such.1 Hashtags have received a new lease on life since tagging became a thing online (#instagram), and emojis continue to usurp the venerable place of the exclamation mark as vessels of emotion. 😬 And then there’s the beautiful ampersand, making life easier by replacing “and” with &, one for the price of three. These non-alphabetical characters that don’t tell us about grammar also belong under the banner of punctuation.
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Then there’s stuff we can do to the words themselves: the way we arrange them on the page, the way we change their looks. You can CAPITALISE something to emphasise it, or write it in italic, in bold, u͟n͟d͟e͟r͟l͟i͟n͟e͟ it, bullet point it, and experiment with the emotional feeling and mental association of a typeface. I’ve written about typefaces (also known as fonts) here. I also recommend books by graphic designer Sarah Hyndman who loves typography as much as I love punctuation.
And lastly, there’s white space itself obtaining the function of punctuation. Where you place the text, to the right or left or middle of the page; whether you double space it; whether you use paragraphs or indentation. I know this sounds odd, but bear with me. A narrow understanding of punctuation would include just the signs that clarify sentence structure (and tone at a push, such as ! and ? and …). A broader concept encompasses anything that arranges written words on a surface, be it a screen, a piece of paper, parchment, bark, rock, the back of your hand. Because the way things are ordered has meaning. It really does make a difference how text is presented, because our eyes and minds (and thus our thoughts and feelings) encounter it differently, and infer different significance, often unconsciously.
One task of punctuation is to bring sense into a potentially chaotic mess of words. It does that by separating one thing from another, a sentence from a sentence, a word from another word, a paragraph from another, a chapter from a chapter — hence this newsletter’s name Mind the Gap! If you want to get on a train on the London underground or roll along nicely through a text, you have to be aware of boundaries! You need to see the empty space, and gracefully step across it to get where you want to be. So, yes, the naked line of a paragraph is punctuation, and it matters!
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Since the beginning of writing - that absolutely magical leap of human genius, choosing to attach a sound in spoken language to a random written sign - people have been concerned about ordering words. As far back as 5500 years ago, writers of the oldest writing system, cuneiform, drew a line between one portion of content and another. That’s punctuation.
Hierglyphs contain a sign looking a bit like an outstretched arm and a balled fist, signalling a pause. Greeks and Romans developed both collective as well as personal signs to mark pauses, tone, sentence structure, and unit of thought. I particularly like the hedera or ivy leaf. ❧
Arabic took over European punctuation at the end of the nineteenth century in order to boost Arabic reading and writing because without dots and dashes it required years of study to be able to make sense, but before that import Arabic separated paragraphs out with stylised flowers and other decorative characters.
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So, whichever technology we’ll be using in the future, and whatever old punctuation gets lost or new punctuation joins the pantheon of signs and strategies at our disposal, one thing is for sure: we’ll always want some demarcation between our words. Some traffic light orchestrating our journey.
And if such a broad scope of punctuation seems odd, consider this: when I was an undergrad, a supervisor who was the leading authority on parentheses in modern literature (yep this title exists) gave us the homework of expunging the punctuation of a John Clare poem. We were relieved at this supposedly light amount of preparation, and returned the next week with the same poem, stripped of full stops and commas. He returned it to us, asking us to remove the punctuation. So, we came back the next week reducing capitalisation to small letters. He returned the papers again, again asking us to remove all the punctuation.
Eventually, as he revealed in the last supervision, he wanted us to bring…nothing. No poem, no paper even. Because one might imagine that a paper, or book, or any object at all punctuates space, and thus belongs to punctuation. Is that pushing it too far? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I just like that punctuation seems so tiny and innocuous, so transparent (we’re often not really supposed to see it, but rather read right through) - something like that can make us go to the extremes and back again, dance around the edges of convention, one foot here and one foot there. And what do you think is punctuation?
In eigtheenth century novels, the asterisk became the star it had always been by substituting letters in order to mock-protect the identity of rakish Lord B****, seducing the daughter of Lady A****bury of H*****shire, thereby incurring the wrath of his rich uncle the Duke of G*****ham who disinherits him and so on…