Take Your Semicolon to Lunch
In the crunch of events, we somehow missed the crucial news that last week was National Punctuation Day! Thank goodness our friend Mike Quinn was more on the ball, and took note of it, thus tipping us off. We'd love to hear your thoughts about your favorite form of punctuation and/or top punctuation memories. If you'd like to send along some photos as well, by all means, please do so. We know how emotional people can be about their punctuation.
15 Comments:
Actually, John, I stumbled upon the information while browsing the Q&A (including some of your A's) on LinkedIn.
It brings to mind Archy, an early 20th Century author who used neither punctuation nor capitalization. The creation of New York newspaper columnist Don Marquis, Archy the cockroach was a reincarnated poet who commandeered Marquis' typewriter at night, hopping from key to key. A cockroach with attitude, he scoffed at those who fret over punctuation and such:
they are always interested in technical details when the main question is whether the stuff is literature or not
How very circular life is sometimes, Mike. And I love that phrase about a cockroach with attitude.
I believe very strongly in punctuation. I know in the past it was overused – Virginia Wolff is a good example – but punctuation allows you to control the flow of your text, to add an extra layer of meaning to it. I'm especially aggrieved by poets who try and get away without any. I don't get it. If it was up to me I would score a poem like a piece of music in fact I keep meaning to have a go at it for the sake of opening up a discussion on the subject.
I remember having a bit of a falling out with my wife once because I included a semi-colon in a poem maybe ten lines long. It was correct punctuation, that's why I used it. I remember Larkin being asked once how to punctuate a poem:
A well-known publisher asked me how one punctuated poetry, and looked flabbergasted when I said, The same as prose. By which I mean that I write, or wrote, as everyone did till the mad lads started, using words and syntax in the normal way to describe recognizable experiences as memorably as possible. That doesn’t seem to me a tradition. The other stuff, the mad stuff, is more an aberration.
Likening the application of punctuation to a piece of writing (and I'd say it applies to prose every bit as much as poetry) to scoring music is simply a master stroke, Jim. Brilliant, useful metaphor. I've always likened them to road signs, giving the reader the right information about pauses and the like to help them understand all the nuances in the piece of writing. Of course, all good writers also think in terms of the sound of their language, which makes the musical analogy so appropriate. I also got a kick out of imagining a married couple arguing over punctuation. You don't come across that every day.
I do not like punctuations indeed, but I think this is an intersting blog and article so I decided to write about my hate for it (I am kidding)
No indeed what I hate is the accents and spelling rules, that you should do correctly, and i do not understand the point for that , but with punctuation you are giving more expresivity, you are allowed to say things better and in a different way, even sometimes if you do not use punctuations sentence can have ambiguous minings and puzze the people who reads them.
I've heard complaints about semicolons; I tend to like them. I think with a lot of commas, but othertimes try to blow right past them.
Mariana, English spelling rules are famously difficult for non-native speakers to pick up, because there are so many weird exceptions. Romance languages are so much more straightforward that way, aren't they? Still, you've managed to do a good job of learning English. And Sevnetus, you're hardly alone in your regard for the semicolon. It's got what can only be called a cult following.
My favorite punctuation memory (really: I have one!) is from the children's TV show "Electric Company." An actor was reading a story aloud - including the punctuation. But instead of saying "comma", "period", "exclamation point" he made a sound for each.
That was over 35 years ago.
I guess the signs that I was going to be a writer appeared early; I just wasn't looking...
Mark, how nice to see your name here, and even nicer that you've gotten into the spirit of things with such a great story. I got a kick out of it. Thanks.
John:
You might get a kick out of this (found on Twitter):
@bigshotprof Palin's book to be first with no periods, ?s or exclamation pts. She kept quitting 1/2 way through sentences.
Mark
Poor Sarah is becoming the butt of a billion jokes. But of course we're pretending that she's writing this book. The truth of course is that her ghostwriter is doing most of the work, while Sarah talks into a tape recorder and perhaps offers a few reactions to drafts she reads. It's good work if you can get it.
Denise Levertov, in her essay "The Function of the Line," actually lays out a way of using punctuation as performance notation for poetry. For example, a semicolon is a longer pause than a comma, a period requires a full stop, whereas a line break might be just a pause. I find this useful as a means of connecting written poems back to reading. It also appeals to me as a composer because it is in essence a musical-notation way of marking breaths within a poem. Sam Hamill has taken this idea and run with it in a couple of his essays on poetics; which are worth reading.
And then there's Victor Borge's "phonetic punctuation," which he performed regularly at his music/;comedy concerts. Really funny stuff.
in my journal there are a lot of uncapitailzed passages separated by semicolons; I find this gives me a sense of continuous flow; even if the breaks are there, the stream of thought continues on, without ever coming to a full stop; perhaps it's a Taoist way of looking at writing; there is no firm ending; there is no definite, emphasized ending, in a passage in which a period seems too strong; like life, art can just stop, rather than coming to an artificially shored-up, definitive ending; it doesn't end, it just stops;
for now;
The phrase "performance notation" gave me a chuckle. Thanks for this interesting blast of food for thought, Art. You always add so much to the conversation.
Sorry I missed the punctuation celebration. I would have expounded on Dash--The Untold Story. I should not play favorites among the dots and squiggles, but I have a tender place in my heart for it.
No one should be ashamed of their secret punctuation favorites. We all harbor certain well-earned biases, and should embrace them with gusto.
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