4 - ‘Know my stops’: Shakespearean punctuation

Summary

Also falling under the heading of graphology is the set of orthographic practices that we call English punctuation. The conventions have taken a millennium to develop, and (as Internet innovations show) the process is not over yet. From a time (in Old English) when manuscripts were almost totally unpunctuated, apart from a few indications of voice inflection, we have moved to a stage where a full use of punctuation is a mark of education. Grammars and publishing houses formulate rules governing usage, and we struggle to follow them – struggle, because the recommendations of different grammarians and publishers do not always agree, even within British (as opposed to American) English. Punctuation is not so much a system, more a set of practices of varying rigour.

Why is punctuation such a problem? Because a huge amount of linguistic responsibility has been placed on a very small number of marks:

the period (.), also called a point or full stop

the semi-colon (;)

the colon (:)

the comma (,)

single (‘ ’) or double (“ ”) inverted commas (especially in UK usage), also called quotation marks or quote marks

the hyphen (-)

the dash ( – )

parentheses ( ), also called round brackets

the question mark (?)

the exclamation mark or (especially US usage) exclamation point (!)

the apostrophe (')

Leaving aside more specialized features, such as square brackets ([ ]) and obelisks ( ), this amounts to not even a dozen marks, and these have to perform a range of overlapping functions.