Making a Point by David Crystal

the way punctuation marks are used, we need to incorporate a further two perspectives that have received only passing mention in my historical account: semantics and pragmatics.
    Interlude: The Good Child’s Book of Stops

    It didn’t take long for nineteenth-century publishers to realize that punctuation presented children with difficulties similar to those encountered in spelling and grammar, and they began to publish colourful and playful accounts of the various marks. Leinstein Madame, as she is called on the title page of The Good Child’s Book of Stops , which is undated, but appeared around 1825, is plainly an advocate of the phonetic approach. She recommends a steady increase in pause lengths as the child moves from comma to semicolon to colon to period. It’s not as drastic an equation as the doubling method advocated by some earlier writers, which ended up with eight beats for a point; but it is still artificial, bearing no relation to what people actually do when reading aloud. Try reading any piece of prose aloud by counting in this way, and watch how quickly you lose your listeners.

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    The way forward: meanings and effects
    One of the messages that comes across loud and clear over the centuries is that punctuation is all about meaning. That’s the bottom line, whether we think of the written language as something to be read aloud or to be read in silence. It’s the need to make the meaning of a written text clear that motivates our use of punctuation. Clarity. Making sense. Avoiding ambiguity. These are the words that turn up over and over in books and essays on punctuation. Authors continually stress the need to bear meaning or sense in mind when thinking about which mark to use. David Steel: ‘Punctuation should lead to the sense.’ John Wilson: ‘The chief aim in pointing a discourse, and its several branches, is to develop, as clearly as possible, the meaning of the writer.’ Meaning is the subject-matter of semantics , which is why a semantic approach to punctuation is important. Grammar plays a critical role in making sense, but other aspects of language contribute too, such as vocabulary and the way we talk about our tones of voice ( he said briskly ). When we are thinking of how to express something in writing, or working out what a piece of writing means, we take all these semantic cues into account.
    But semantics alone is not enough to account for the way we use language. Often we’re faced with a choice when we want to express a particular meaning – a choice that conveys different intentions or effects. In grammar, for example, we have the choice of writing I will or I’ll : the meaning is thesame, but the effect is different – the second usage is more informal than the first. Similarly, in punctuation we are sometimes offered a choice of forms, such as whether to use a comma or not, or whether to use single or double inverted commas, and we need to know what the consequences are of using one rather than the other. Authors continually stress the need for punctuation to be effective – to help orators or writers elicit a desired response in their listeners or readers – and this is a matter of choosing the right marks. Authors also find it important that a page should ‘look’ right, and this too is a matter of choosing the right marks. Making choices is at the heart of pragmatics , which is why a pragmatic approach to punctuation is important. It’s here that we will explore many of the loose ends that we’ve seen bedevilling earlier accounts, such as references to a writer’s ‘judgement’ or ‘taste’.
    We need to use both perspectives, semantic and pragmatic, when evaluating punctuation. If you find it difficult to understand what someone has written because of the way punctuation has been used, then you’re reacting semantically. But if you don’t like the look of what someone has written