Punctuation
For reasons that escape my understanding, most students aren’t taught the conventions and punctuation of contemporary English writing.
Milan 2019
Here’s a sentence that hits just the right pitch yet would be tossed out of nearly every composition class:
Fury, MGM, 1936, is, I believe, Lang’s first American film.
Notice how the staccato rhythm—with five commas in the first six words—prompts you to sit forward and slow down. And notice how your reading speed comes much closer to how, we can presume, the sentence would sound if spoken by a stilted, uncertain voice. What we have is the timid rhythm of a subject that’s just been introduced. But sentences rarely come in isolation—even a witty reply has a context and follows other lines—so you probably need more to spot the effect:
It is the top of 1937. I am not yet thirteen. Fury, MGM, 1936, is, I believe, Lang’s first American film. It is meant to be a study of mob violence, on which level it is indignant, sincere, and inept. Since the mob separates the lovers almost at the beginning of the film, the film works as a love story only intermittently, and to the extent that one responds to the lovers (Sylvia Sidney and Spencer Tracy).
Few would even consider challenging the voice of James Baldwin, his work almost always blending a casual, direct vernacular with a sense of high style—and this passage is a good example of that artistry. Some writers can toss around sentences in a conversational tone and it works just fine. Other writers can shape sentences with the posture of an academic or intellectual or aristocrat and that, occasionally, works just fine too. Very few writers can combine the conversational with the sophisticated and still end up with eloquence—though I would argue that this cocktail is the pinnacle of literary writing.
One notable aspect of the above passage—from The Devil Finds Work—is that you’re forced to listen rather than read. Review the sentences individually, and notice the change in tempo that’s achieved through punctuation and sentence length: the opening begins gradually, with direct words and a clear structure, but, by the end of the passage, you’ve fallen into a breathless, lyrical rhythm, until you trail the final sentence downhill. Just like a painter who makes the highlights brighter by adding more shadows, the fifth sentence flows because the opening stutters.
Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
Now examine this passage from Edna O’Brien that also caught my eye. It comes from Country Girl, O’Brien’s artful memoir, and has her childhood dining room as its subject.
I still recall the rapture as a child, gazing, gazing at a great amphora of artificial tea roses in yellow and red, far more beautiful than the dog roses on the briars or the devils pokers in the garden outside, which, because of the way they smoldered, somehow looked spiteful.
Perhaps the sentence is a tad difficult to judge outside of its context, yet, even without the larger story, the words are striking. It’s a peculiar construction, one that triggered me to reread what I had just skimmed past. And that peculiarity gives the page a distinct voice, which is closer to transcribed speech than original writing. You almost have the sense—and, despite appearances, this is intended as a compliment—that the writer isn’t accustomed to writing. After you pass the alliterative opening of recall the rapture, you lurch forward the rest of the way, encircling the subject, tangent by tangent, unsure about the endpoint—though that endpoint, with the word spiteful, slams the sentence door closed. There is, too, that perfect cocktail of spoken language and intellectual writing: the feverish repetition that comes with gazing, gazing is an example of the former, while the precise word choice of amphora is an example of the latter.
Notice the slight lilt in her sentence. There are two spots where O’Brien gives you a little nudge, with the first coming at that repetition of gazing just eight words into the sentence—it is a slight hiccup, a restart, a chance for you to take a breath and prepare for the long descriptive clause that comes next. The second nudge comes when she squeezes which between two commas: take the opportunity for a pause here, she instructs, as I’m about to slam this sentence shut with a word you don’t expect, and I want spiteful to have its full thrust.
If you examine the tempo, if you read this sentence aloud, you do hear O’Brien’s voice—impassioned, direct, consumed by the story. She’s in the room rather than on the page. She’s at the table and looks you in the eye while she tells her tale. This sentence—which appears deceptively close to clumsy writing—has power because good writers trick you into focusing.
To drop a comma only when you want a pause or a breath is, of course, a mistake that’s worth avoiding. For reasons that escape my understanding, however, most students aren’t taught the conventions of contemporary English writing. Nor are they taught that the most basic elements—such as sentence length or rhythm—will always influence meaning. They’re taught, instead, to sprinkle commas around their sentences whenever the urge strikes—for an exhale, when a thought is complete, and, my favorite, because a sentence seems a tad long and a tiny squiggle somewhere in the middle can’t hurt. So it is no real surprise to encounter writing even in professional settings where commas interrupt the prose in a haphazard manner, almost like hiccups in the middle of otherwise coherent clauses, with hardly any link between the words you read and the punctuation you see.
Now here’s a question that you can’t answer: what is punctuation? Try your best, consider all your options, but note the traps. Even if you have a reflexive answer that feels correct, you might note, with a little time, that you’re on rather unstable footing. What’s involved in this question and in the conventions of modern writing goes far beyond the usual commas and question marks and hyphens—a crisp page of writing has innumerable conventions that aren’t quite grammar and aren’t quite vocabulary but that you just might consider punctuation, such as the necessity of beginning this sentence with a capital letter, or of beginning the next sentence as a new paragraph.
Of course the conventions are slippery: we no longer capitalize every noun, nor do we follow the lackadaisical, circuitous sentence structure of past centuries. And we should expect that malleability to continue—our norms for punctuation will shift just like our norms for conversation. What sounds right when you speak in one context, or in one time period, comes across as coarse, or simply antiquated, when you speak in another. In every period, however, the goal remains the same even though the tools change: it is to be artful or informative or persuasive or descriptive or declarative. And to both use or ignore the punctuation conventions of your time will help to determine whether you’re effective.
But take a step back and examine an older form first—the method that came long before writing: where’s the punctuation in speaking? Obviously writing isn’t merely transcribed speaking, but do the squiggles typically associated with punctuation—those commas and question marks and hyphens—float in the air? When you have a conversation, how do you sense those symbols? It is a curious thought, as there are no paragraph breaks or semicolons or indentations or capital letters in a conversation, yet we always transcribe those elements in dictated speech, and we also manage to agree on what nobody actually hears.
Perhaps a reasonable case can be made that punctuation translates the infinite variety of vocal cues—tone of voice, inflection, pace, diction, shock, surprise, even confusion—onto the page. Imagine saying the word stop, for instance, and note that you can enunciate it with anger, dismay, excitement, laughter, flirtation, without once changing how the word is spelled. Now try to reflect those differences on the page while limiting yourself to that one word, in all its implications and nuances and undertones. Punctuation serves to direct the writer’s tempo, to slow, to emphasize, to even halt, a line, while the absence of punctuation can serve to thrust a sentence forward at a rate far faster than the reader expected just a moment earlier so that a point is revealed rather than explained.