Blog Post #17, In Which I Talk About Punctuation
I've consciously been trying to use elocutionary punctuation when writing these blog posts.
Elocutionary punctuation is a style which views punctuation as serving only to denote pauses; this in contrast to the usual Syntactic punctuation style taught in school, in which Punctuation is the scion of Grammar and carries immutable semantic meaning.
The lengths of pauses go, from shortest to longest, comma, semicolon, colon, period, paragraph break.
Other people (who actually know what they're talking about) have written more about this, so i'll defer to them:
It is important to note that Elocutionary punctuation came first, and that Syntactic punctuation is a more recent trend.
I've found that for normal speech, elocutionary punctuation isn't much different from syntactic punctuation-after all, the syntactic rules were derived from the common usage in what was elocutionary text. Where they differ greatly is in edge cases-when you are trying to say things that aren't fully grammatically structured.
The first case where i noticed a big difference was Blog Post #16: look at the two big paragraphs near the beginning. They were originally punctuated like so:
It started, as most of my posts seem to, as a jumble of disconnected sentences. My mind churning out stray thoughts to be captured in pixels. I worked sporadically, in half-hour sprints. There was progress, but it was slow progress. The hour grew late. I kept working. It grew later. I started to worry. And something happened. Somehow, as i pounded haphazardly on the keyboard, something shifted. And emerged. Ideas collided and cohered. A structure arose from the chaos. Fumbling paragraphs were merged. Awkward phrases were fixed. One thing led to another, and everything just came together. And as the Witching Hour drew near, i added the finishing touches and mashed "Post!"
As you can see, they were actually one huge paragraph with far too many periods. This was probably fine as syntactic punctuation goes, but as i read the post to myself, i realized that i read that section with increasing speed; so i altered the punctuation accordingly (and inserted a longer pause between the two halves), and wound up with this:
It started, as most of my posts seem to, as a jumble of disconnected sentences, my mind churning out stray thoughts to be captured in pixels. I worked sporadically, in half-hour sprints. There was progress, but it was slow progress. The hour grew late-i kept working. It grew later-i started to worry. And something happened.
Somehow, as i pounded haphazardly on the keyboard, something shifted. And emerged. Ideas collided and cohered; a structure arose from the chaos; fumbling paragraphs were merged, awkward phrases were fixed, one thing led to another and everything just came together-and as the Witching Hour drew near, i added the finishing touches and mashed "Post!"
I think it reads better.
Writers like Mark Twain understood that spelling was mutable. 1 We geeks who communicate through IRC and email understand that Spelling and Punctuation are tools which are subservient to the ultimate goal of Communication. We know full well how important it is to express Intent when speaking through text-only channels; otherwise we risk being misinterpreted and pissing someone off.
Thus the liberal use of emoticons :-) and other typographical tricks.
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I hesitate to use Twain as an example because i haven't actually read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ↩