The Curious Power of Punctuation
Do you know the first sentence of “Pride and Prejudice”? You probably think you do, but I bet you don’t. The answer is “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Did you remember to put in the commas?
What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. Did Jane Austen even write them? Probably not. Judging by her few surviving manuscripts, Austen didn’t much use commas (or paragraphs). She used dashes.
Here is a passage from the manuscript of her last finished novel, “Persuasion”:
Here is the same passage from the published book:
And so on. The published version replaces five dashes and three ampersands, and lowercases four capitalized nouns. It sounds more like Austen, but maybe Austen really sounded like Virginia Woolf.
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Austen must have made some of these revisions herself, but it is believed that the grammar and punctuation in her later novels were cleaned up by a man named William Gifford, who was an editor at Austen’s publisher, John Murray. (“Pride and Prejudice” was an early novel, published by a different house.) Which might mean that the polished, quasi-epigrammatic sentences we find so Austenian may not be sentences Austen actually wrote.
Florence Hazrat, the author of “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World” (Basic), would wish to point out that the difference for the reader in these two versions of “Persuasion” is entirely a function of the punctuation. Change dashes to commas, smooth out the prose, and the whole Austen experience is altered. What was pell-mell and excited becomes thoughtful and decorous.
Hazrat’s book is a history of punctuation—or some punctuation, since it barely mentions the apostrophe, the serial comma, or quotation marks. “On the Mark” is a “the X that changed the world” book, which is a popular genre. Its claim is that “the history of punctuation is the history of humanity.”
This ambition inevitably leads to overreach. If punctuation played a role in everything, what about, say, the war in Gaza? Hazrat finds a link. “Punctuation marks in Hebrew,” she explains, “are relics of a brutal colonial system that is far from over.” Adding punctuation turned Hebrew into a spoken language, “paving the way for an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe, encouraging them to move to the land that already had people—a people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European anti-Semitism in the most horrendous ways for generations.” It seems (the reason is not altogether clear) that, had Yiddish been the official language of Israel, atrocities might have been avoided.
Zionist complicities aside, Hazrat is a punctuation enthusiast, though there are a few marks that she is not very fond of. The semicolon is one. She calls it “a dreamy kind of mark for meandering minds.” I would have said that the comma splice is the dreamy mark for meandering minds, not the semicolon, whose function is to replace the comma splice. But she doesn’t seem to know the semicolon’s correct usage. She thinks it’s a big comma, when it’s actually a small period.
On the other hand, she can’t get enough of the parenthesis, which, she says, dates to antiquity. I had always thought of parentheticals as subversive, a teasing or skeptical interpolation, the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Hazrat understands them in pretty much the opposite way. “The parenthesis is a gentle kind of interruption, stable and predictable and balanced,” she says. “The parenthesis in word and deed is an ethical way of life.” (Since I use a lot of parentheses, this was encouraging.)
She tells us that the sentence-ending period was invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, the head of the Library of Alexandria, in the second or third century B.C.E.; that the earliest known question mark is in a fifth-century document written in Syriac, a language close to Aramaic, which Jesus spoke; and that the exclamation mark dates from the mid-fourteenth century. The invention of the printing press, around 1440, let loose what she describes as “a flurry of signs,” including the semicolon, quotation marks, the dash, and the ellipsis. No new marks have been added since 1600 (unless you count emojis, which we will get to).
In Hazrat’s view, the greatest changed-the-world punctuation mark of all time is the space. She tells us that it was invented in the eighth century by Irish monks to separate the words in a sentence. She calls this hack “revolutionary.” “Perhaps,” she says, “it would be a stretch to say that the Irish monks’ invention led to the liberations of classes and genders, caused wars and peaceful pacts, and paved the way for economic booms and busts, literary masterpieces from Hamlet to Les Misérables, and the development of the internet. Perhaps that’s going too far, and perhaps not far enough.”
I would say too far. But she has a point. The history of punctuation is the history of humanity in the sense that changes in the technology of writing—changes in how we write and how we make what we have written available to readers—correlate with changes in the distribution of social power. The purpose of punctuation is to make writing easier to read, and making writing easier to read means giving greater and greater numbers of people access to the written word. Literacy is no longer the monopoly of a privileged class. Today, even the gatekeepers are gone, or have turned into paywalls.
The excitement that Hazrat feels about punctuation—little marks that make a big difference—is a lot like Sarah L. Kaufman’s enthusiasm for verbs. Verbs, Kaufman tells us in “Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing” (Penguin Press), “can leap off the page and land in our bodies. They tickle the senses. They delight the instinct for movement. At times, they may tell you something true about yourself. All that in a word.” Verbs are infinitely adaptable, she says. They are “the Cate Blanchetts of language.”
The book is about how to use and misuse the different parts of speech (there are nine), with an emphasis on the verb. Kaufman has a favorite sentence that serves as a touchstone. It’s the last sentence of “The Great Gatsby,” and I bet you do know this one: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” She grows eloquent on the magic of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s diction. “You might feel his verbs in your body, so delicately you’re not quite aware of it,” she says. “The repeated B sound—beat, boats, borne back—is percussive. The physical resonance of the verb beat may echo internally in many ways, as you feel a soft drumbeat, as your heart beats. Reading ‘borne back’ may light a brief, indistinct flickering inside, a sense of how your own consciousness can whoosh backward in time.”
Apart from the fact that I have never understood what Fitzgerald is trying to say here—isn’t the whole point of the book not that Gatsby is doomed to return to the past but that he can’t?—I think that “beat” and “borne” lack visual concreteness. Shouldn’t it be “paddle”? “Paddle” sounds a little silly, but that’s the metaphor Fitzgerald is using. (Those boats must be canoes, not steamboats. A steamboat wouldn’t care that much about a current.)
Kaufman spent many years as the chief dance critic for the Washington Post, a job that must demand novel and unexpected ways of saying “leaping,” “lifting,” and “pirouetting”—hence her verb fascination. But she has thoughts about other parts of speech as well, and she offers a good deal of usage advice. Basically, “Verb Your Enthusiasm” is a style guide for newspaper writers: cut down on adjectives and adverbs, avoid the passive voice, prefer monosyllabic words, always say “he said” (not “he shouted,” “whispered,” “stated,” “averred,” and so on).
These tips make for good newspaper writing, but unless you are Ernest Hemingway, who began his career as a newspaper reporter and credited the Kansas City Star’s style guide with forming the basis of his style, they do not define good writing per se. Newspaper writing differs from most other writing because print-newspaper space is finite. The fewer words you use, and the more recognizable they are, the more you can say and the faster you can say it. That is where this modern minimalist verbal style comes from. Joan Didion, the mistress of concision and a Hemingway admirer, began her career writing captions and sidebars to fit around pictures in women’s magazines. Most writers don’t have those constraints, real or imaginary.
Still, Kaufman thinks that, if we are looking to speed the eye and save space, one part of speech we should be happy to throw overboard is the adverb. Her point is that if you have picked the right verb it won’t need to be modified. And many adverbs (“really,” “truly,” “literally”) do seem to be empty intensifiers. “Adverbial crutches are everywhere and misused in the extreme,” she warns (or, if you prefer, “says”). Her particular bête noire is “actually,” which she calls “one of the most annoying and overused words in the English language.”
Microsoft Word doesn’t like “actually,” either. It tells me that “more concise language would be clearer for the reader.” I know this because I have already used “actually” twice in this piece, and I set off a Word alarm both times. Did they annoy you? Wouldn’t it have been more annoying if I had used, for example, italics, as in “sentences Jane Austen wrote”? Adverbs and italics often do the same work, but unless you are J. D. Salinger, who had a genius for them, italics can seem like an artificial pumping up of significance, verbal Viagra. Still, I have used italics in that manner once in this piece. And adverbs, even the intensifiers, can add shading and tone to a sentence. I can see giving them up for directness, but it is a trade-off. Writers have a toolbox. Why not use the whole kit?
E-mail, text messaging, and the internet have swamped us with new signifiers. I no longer need parentheses; I can use a raised-eyebrow emoji instead. I don’t write to someone anymore; I e-mail or D.M. them. “E-mail” is a denominalization, a noun turned into a verb. E-mail was a thing before it was a thing you did.
Denominalizations are not new. They happen constantly, and Kaufman, as a verb person, has an attraction to them. She says that Fitzgerald used “to cocktail” as a verb, as in “Cocktailest thou? Dost cocktail? Wilt cocktail?” But she notes that the coinage dates from the eighteen-sixties. Much of denominalization amounts to a brand war. Today, we say “I Googled it,” but not “I Binged it” or “I DuckDuckGo-ed it,” just as we say “I Ubered to the restaurant,” but not “I Lyfted to the restaurant” or, God forbid, “I Hertzed to the restaurant.” I can FedEx a package, and maybe UPS one, but at the post office it’s always “I mailed the package.”
It is, of course, all a corporate plot to insinuate commercial products into our everyday lives, a strategy that has been colossally successful for brands like Scotch Tape, Band-Aid, and Kleenex. Someday, “I Ubered” will just mean “I used a car service”; maybe it does already. There are also what I guess could be called deverbalizations: “the reveal,” “the ask.” But Kaufman doesn’t get into those. (A super-annoying and omnipresent related usage is “weaponize.” Use of that non-word must stop, today.)
These books are reminders that we are in the middle of a revolution in the phenomenology of reading, a major change in what it is like to consume writing. Many written texts we simply decode—instruction manuals, advertising copy, legal boilerplate. But, when we read for pleasure or for edification, we imagine a person “behind” the words. We treat writing as substitute speech. We say “That’s Jane Austen” or “That’s Virginia Woolf.” We feel we get to know writers by the sound of their words. More grandly, we experience writing as a way of transmitting an author’s state of mind, or set of emotions, to our own.
But, today, digital systems can generate Austen-like and Woolf-like sentences. We had feelings about our imaginary Austens and Woolfs; we “knew” them. But we are starting to realize that it is pointless, or stupid, to have feelings about sentences that a program spews out at an alarming rate. At some point, we will stop anthropomorphizing the words on the page or on the screen and start treating them the way we treat numbers, as marks to decode. When that happens, what will be left of the reading experience?
Hazrat and Kaufman subscribe to the theory of embodied cognition. They want us to understand reading as a somatic experience. “Verbs ignite emotions, transform our thoughts, and stimulate our bodies,” Kaufman says. That’s why she hears a heartbeat in Fitzgerald’s famous sentence. Hazrat puts it this way: “Punctuation enables us to access a text as a multidimensional full-bodied, full-mind experience.” Their books are therefore, in some respects, elegies to a conception of reading and writing which seems to be nearing an end.
We talk back to our G.P.S., and we say rude things to Siri. But that’s because we are mainly still living in a pre-A.I. world. The A.I. world itself still feels foreign. There is a creepy fascination with stories about people who fall for their chatbots, lawyers who submit A.I.-generated briefs, students who hand in ChatGPT-ed writing assignments. But we will adapt. Soon, people will no longer make a distinction between writing made by a human and writing made by a machine. It will all simply be writing. In that world, reading will no longer be the kind of embodied experience that Hazrat and Kaufman memorialize.
Hazrat complains about the disembodied feel of text messaging, and the fact that, as she reports, ninety-one per cent of Americans believe they can express themselves better in emojis than in written words. “No video conferencing or instant text messaging can replace presence,” she says, “and so we cling to the make-believe of technology.” What we are experiencing, she thinks, is not an ordinary shift in language use: “Generative AI confronts us with the possibility of a near-total abandonment of thinking work, that is, reading and writing. The surface engagement (if it can be called even that) of having ChatGPT read articles for us is already impacting our cognitive faculties negatively.”
She admits that chatbots have all sorts of personalized features, but they’re all fake. The conversational tone keeps us “talking” to the computer “because it feels like a real person,” she says. “Feedback functions like the typing awareness indicator and feel-good marks like emojis keep us online, keep us sending one more message, and another, and another, trying to finally get what we crave, connection, through something that simply cannot provide that, technology.”
Texting has virtually eliminated punctuation, undoing the centuries of innovation that gave sentences rhythm, shape, and meaning. Texters often forgo capitals and question marks (although they do overuse exclamation marks), and the period is avoided. “The polite way to be rude now is to use correct punctuation,” Hazrat says.
Kaufman is less apocalyptic. “No bot—so far—can craft poetic physical language that makes us feel something,” she assures us. Surely it’s only a matter of time. L.L.M.s already write poetry; the question is how good they can become at it. Right now, there is little money to be made from making them better poets. When there is, or even if there never is, they will keep improving in much the same way human beings do: by reading lots of poetry and learning what works. In the end, writing is just a technology. There is nothing magical about it. The usual worry is that we will mistake a machine’s poem for a person’s. The more dispiriting prospect is that we will dismiss a person’s poem as A.I. slop. We admire the person who can make good sentences, like Austen or Fitzgerald. Can we admire the makers of a generative A.I. that can do the same? ♦