The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion (Part Six)

This, the sixth part of a historical survey of the career of punctuation, attempts to describe a few vibrant decades when the mutual influence of punctuation and language brought to light many new ideas. After the publication of Ephraim Chambers\u27 encyclopaedia and Samuel Johnson\u27s dictionary, a prevailing passion for \u27truth\u27 put to rout the age-old, commonplace linguistic theories. A tremendous energy came to be applied towards resolving not only the exalted mysteries of the universe and the human mind, but also more homely problems-how to set up a power-driven loom, or breed a Hampshire pig, or even, how properly to insert into text a mark as simple as a comma

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion (Part Three)

This is the third in a series of articles on the past and future of punctuation. The years under focus here are crucial ones, for they include the invention of the printing press and the shift it caused in the human response to the written word

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion (Part Nine)

In the writing ofauthors Henryjames, Robert Louis Stevenson, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, james joyce, E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway, Robinson traces the development in the twentieth century of two rival styles, one plaindealing and the other complected. In the literary skirmish between the two, the latter may be losing-perhaps at the expense of our reasoning powers

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion (Part Four)

This, the fourth in a series of essays on the history of punctuation, deals with Renaissance and Jacobean England, a period of intense experiment both in language and in the bookmaking arts. Printing, now fully in action, governed the public perception of what looked best on the page and how text should be pointed and spelled. Special attention is given to authors such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion is a study, in several parts, of the origins of punctuation and its development to the present day. Part One, herewith, follows the subject from its murky beginnings into the broad daylight of classical usage

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion, Part X

TEXTBOOKS for budding journalists are recommending short sentences of fifteen to twenty words and vertical lists for \u27a clear layout\u27 of difficult materials. They instruct that to be successful, authors need not embellish every sentence with a verb, nor, in fact, worry very much about \u27grammar\u27. Language should be pitched to suit the sophistication levels of the reading masses, of whom there are an estimated seventy-seven million incompetents lurking in the U.K. and the U.S. alone. Such are the guiding directives for practising writers, and by extension, for editors, publishers, and book sellers, all of whom are scrambling to accommodate the public. While they race to make text easier, readers become less inclined (and less able) to deal with language that is demanding. Today, even careful writers must face the fact that fine distinctions between such marks as colons and semicolons will be lost on many of their readers

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion (Part Five)

This, the fifth in a series on the history and ambitions of punctuation, describes the first vigorous manifestation of logical pointing. In an enlightened atmosphere of book reading and language consciousness, it was discerned that the shapes of sentences and their working parts were better delineated when punctuated syntactically

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion (Part Seven)

Though eighteenth-century grammarians had brought light to the profundities of our subject, their erudition and philosophical remove more often than not disqualified their ideas for popular application. Nineteenth-century scholars were a more practical breed. Their goal was to preserve the integrity of English in afar-flung and diversifying Empire. A standardized language was imperative for perspicuity in communication: for the lingua communis ofpoets and philosophers, as well asfor commerce, science, mass education, and government. In the drive for clarity and uniformity, discussions ofthe values ofthe stops and how they should be appliedformed apart of virtually every nineteenth-century grammar textbook

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion (Part Two)

Part One of this serialized survey (Courier 23.2, Fall 1988) dealt with the emergence of a late-Classical and early-Christian interest in eliciting, with \u27euphuistic\u27 punctating techniques, the voice patterns inherent in text. Part Two, herewith, gives attention to the Middle Ages. In this haphazard era, logical punctuation, which concentrates on syntactical structures and is therefore more appealing to eye than ear, begins its faltering growth

The Punctator\u27s World: A Discursion (Part Eight)

Robinson reviews the progress of punctuation between 1850 and 1900, showing how - admidst the ongoing (but increasingly sophisticated) contest between the demands of the eye and the ear, of grammar and rhetoric-writing in English reached new expressive heights in the work of Pater, Dickinson, and others