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English Punctuation |
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Halliday (1985) Punctuation categories | |
| boundary markers | show grammatical units, for example word spaces 'Air tragedy city in mourning' versus 'Airtragedycityinmourning' |
| status markers | show the function of units, for instance question marks 'How could this happen again?' |
| relation markers | show links between units, for example apostrophes 'At 95 he's gardening's grand old man' |
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Why punctuation matters |
| 'You don't want to look stupid!' (Punctuation Repair Kit, VanDyck, 1996) |
| 'The problem with poor punctuation is that it makes life difficult for the reader who needs to read what you've written' (Penguin, Trask, 1997) |
| Punctuation 'is a system that allows us to write, to be read, with clarity' (Cassell, Todd, 1995) |
| 'Punctuation is essential to good writing' (Chambers, Jarvie, 1992) |
| '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) |
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Frequencies
of | |
| Commas | 47% |
| Full stops | 45% |
| Dashes | 2% |
| Parentheses | 2% |
| Semicolons | 2% |
| Question marks | 1% |
| Colons | 1% |
| Exclamation marks | 1% |
| Source Meyer (1987)'s analysis of the Brown Corpus | |
| Frequencies for comma distribution | |
| Elements in a series (words, phrases, clauses etc) | 20.3% |
| Sentence-initial elements (words, phrases, clauses etc) | 20.2% |
| Sentence-final elements (phrases, clauses) | 5.0% |
| Non-restrictive phrases or clauses | 17.3% |
| Appositives | 26.1% |
| Interrupters | 6.6% |
| Quotations | 4.5% |
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Source (Bayraktar et al, 1998 based on Wall Street Journal) | |
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Sample text sentences |
| But now there were things that were not being talked of, a wall of silence being built around the unspoken sadnesses, silently, day by day, partitioning off parts of him, places that became the more taboo with time, building a wall that would become a part of them, taken for granted, hardly noticed at all, a wall that, once built, would be breachable only by the unthinkable, by assault and destruction; or it would never be breached at all, so that only a part of themselves was contiguous open plan, until they could no longer see each other whole, note the origins of act and word. P. Adamson (2000), The Tuscan Master London, Sceptre, p.48 |
| Before them in the West the world lay still, formless and grey; but even as they looked, the shadows of night melted, the colours of the waking earth returned: green flowed over the wide meads of Rohan; the white mists shimmered in the water-vales; and far off to the left, thirty leagues or more, blue and purple stood the White Mountains, rising into peaks of jet, tipped with glimmering snows, flushed with the rose of morning.. J.R. Tolkien The Twin Towers |
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Traditional printing craft rules for
hyphenating
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| 1. At hyphenated line-ends, leave at least two characters behind and take three forward. |
| 2. Avoid leaving the stub-end of a hyphenated word, or any word shorter than four letters, as the last line of a paragraph |
| 3. Avoid more than three consecutive hyphenated lines. |
| 4. Hyphenate proper names only as a last resort unless they occur with the frequency of common nouns |
| 5. Hyphenate according to the conventions of the language |
| … |
| 10. Abandon any and all rules of hyphenation and pagination that fail to serve the needs of the text. |
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Some References | |
| Todd, L. (1995) | The Cassell Guide to Punctuation, Cassell |
| Nunberg, G. (1990) | The Linguistics of Punctuation, CSLI |
| NASA manual link | |
| Punctuation Project link: quotations (link) | |
| The Philosophy of Punctuation (link) | |
| The Greengrocer's Apostrophe | |
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Some usable quotes |
| No iron can stab the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place. Isaac Babel |
| One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided wherever possible. Winston Churchill |
| Punctuation marks: The fig-leaves that hide the private parts of literature. Pablo Picasso |