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HOW TO USE PUNCTUATION ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
Lindley Murray and Goold Brown laid down cast-iron rules
for punctuation, but most of them have been broken long since and thrown into
the junk-heap of disuse. They were too rigid, too strict, went so much into
minutiae, that they were more or less impractical to apply to ordinary
composition. The manner of language, of style and of expression has
considerably changed since then, the old abstruse complex sentence with its
hidden meanings has been relegated to the shade, there is little of prolixity
or long-drawn-out phrases, ambiguity of expression is avoided and the aim is
toward terseness, brevity and clearness. Therefore, punctuation has been
greatly simplified, to such an extent indeed, that it is now as much a matter
of good taste and judgment as adherence to any fixed set of rules. Nevertheless
there are laws governing it which cannot be abrogated, their principles must be
rigidly and inviolably observed.
The chief end of punctuation is to mark the grammatical
connection and the dependence of the parts of a composition, but not the actual
pauses made in speaking. Very often the points used to denote the delivery of a
passage differ from those used when the passage is written. Nevertheless,
several of the punctuation marks serve to bring out the rhetorical force of
expression.
The principal marks of punctuation are:
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The Comma [,]
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The Semicolon [;]
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The Colon [:]
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The Period [.]
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The Interrogation [?]
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The Exclamation [!]
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The Dash [—]
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The Parenthesis [()]
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The Quotation [" "]
There are several other points or marks to indicate
various relations, but properly speaking such come under the heading of
Printer's Marks, some of which are treated elsewhere.
Of the above, the first four may be styled the grammatical
points, and the remaining five, the rhetorical points. |
