Strand 3/Conventions – Post 3: Punctuation clarifies – or doesn’t

The primary purpose of punctuation is to clarify, to help the reader understand the text. There are some common examples of how punctuation can disambiguate phrases and sentences that would otherwise be ambiguous.

Let’s eat Zelda.

With no comma this example, of course, means that we will eat Zelda. Simply add a comma and we are now addressing Zelda.

Let’s eat, Zelda.

The comma in the example above helps the reader to read the text in the way that is intended. Although the previous post discusses the fact that punctuation does not typically correlate with speech pauses, it often does correlate with intonation – the pitch across the string of words. And in examples like those above, the intonation distinctions in the spoken versions of these sentences would allow the listener to understand the words just as they were intended.

You can find plenty of other examples of changes in punctuation leading to changes of meaning – often unintended. I don’t even want to link to them since many of them are rants, suggesting the downfall of a society that doesn’t pay enough attention to punctuation, but if you’re so inclined, you may search. A few of the most prevalent examples are the one above (usually with Grandma instead of Zelda, the “dear John” example (ok, I’ll link to that one), and the panda joke, now also the title of a book by Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves.

A panda walks into a bar, sits down and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich, pulls out a gun and shoots the waiter dead. As the panda stands up to go, the bartender shouts, “Hey! Where are you
going? You just shot my waiter and you didn't pay for your sandwich!” The panda yells back at the bartender, “Hey, I'm a PANDA! Look it up!” The bartender opens his dictionary and sees the following definition for panda: "A tree dwelling marsupial of Asian origin, characterized by distinct black and white coloring. Eats shoots and leaves.

So the punctuation in these examples certainly is useful, marking various kinds of phrases and clauses, resulting in different interpretations. (Though the panda one is really an artificial example since writers don't typically leave out that first comma between eats and shoots. Now, the so-called Oxford comma is a different story, which perhaps I'll return to.)

But sometimes punctuation is purely convention. It doesn’t mark grammatical distinctions or intonation contours or anything. But it’s conventional, so we do it. We learn to put a comma between a city name and a state name (Ferndale, Washington) and between the day of the month and the year (April 15, 2000), but wouldn’t these be just as easy for the reader to understand with no commas?

And capitalization – is that punctuation? We capitalize certain words by convention: proper nouns, of course, but also the pronoun I. Does capitalization of I serve to clarify? We’re accustomed to it as a convention, so it would be odd to us not to do it, but we don’t capitalize any other pronouns like She, They, or even the other first person singular Me. That would be strange, wouldn’t it?

And what about the apostrophe used in contractions? By convention, we put an apostrophe when letters have been deleted, so do plus not becomes don’t, but wouldn’t dont be just as clear in context?

Why dont you try it? Cant you read it just fine? Wouldnt it be easy enough?

Another example of punctuation as simply convention is the rule regarding end punctuation and quotation marks. The convention within the US is for all punctuation to go inside quotation marks, so it looks like the following example, with the period after okra preceding the ”:

The girl said, “I like okra.”

However, the convention in the UK is for the punctuation to go outside the quotation marks:

The girl said, “I like okra”.

One rule does not necessarily make more sense than the other and neither has anything to do with grammatical categories or with even clarity – it’s simply convention.

Such rules of punctuation are often lumped in to the study of “grammar,” broadly defined. However, these rules of writing do not depend on and are not affected by our spoken language or our unconscious (or conscious) knowledge of it. These “conventional” rules must be taught and learned, and are not the natural rules of language itself.

Ok, but on to the rules of punctuation that do correlate with grammatical distinctions.