30.4091, Review: Writing Systems: Spector (2017)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-30-4091. Tue Oct 29 2019. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 30.4091, Review: Writing Systems: Spector (2017)

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Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 10:05:22
From: Filippo Pecorari [filippo.pecorari at unibas.ch]
Subject: The Quotable Guide to Punctuation

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36522237


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-616.html

AUTHOR: Stephen  Spector
TITLE: The Quotable Guide to Punctuation
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Filippo Pecorari, University of Basel

SUMMARY

This book is a popular guide to punctuation issues in English, mainly aimed at
a readership of undergraduate students and non-linguists. It is a sequel to a
previous book on grammatical issues by the same author (Spector 2015). The
chapters of the book are referred to as “lessons”, devoted to a single
punctuation mark or, in some cases, to a specific usage or function of a mark
that is examined over more than one lesson. What characterizes the book, as
appears from the title, is the presence of a considerable number of quotes,
i.e. examples taken from a vast array of media, text genres and writers. The
function of quotes is to exemplify empirically the forms and functions of
punctuation commented on in each lesson and to let the reader work out the
rules through an inductive process. Quotes are given at the beginning of each
lesson and of each subsection within the lesson; they are followed by
historical notes about the punctuation mark, rules and guidelines of usage
(highlighted in boldface), boxes with fun facts, and quizzes.

The book is made up of 34 lessons, preceded by three introductory chapters
dealing with the aim of the book (pp. 1-5), some reasons to love or hate
punctuation (pp. 7-15), and a brief overview of basic grammar terms (pp.
17-25); it is closed by notes (pp. 285-303), a concise select bibliography
(pp. 305-307), an index of names and subjects (pp. 309-313), and a list of the
sources of the quotations given in the whole text (pp. 315-322).

The space devoted by the author to each punctuation mark is unequal; some of
them are quickly treated in a few pages, whereas some others receive a much
greater attention, extending at times over much more than one lesson. The core
of the book is opened by a series of four lessons devoted to the apostrophe
(pp. 29-52), where some formal issues of its usage are discussed (e.g. the
marking of possessive case, plurals, omitted letters). After a single lesson
about the colon (pp. 53-64), the attention is focused on the comma, to which
fifteen lessons are devoted (pp. 67-158); among the many phenomena touched
upon in these lessons there are some regular usages of the mark, such as in a
series of coordinated elements or around parentheticals, but also some
controversial ones, such as the comma splice or the Oxford comma. The author
then moves on to a couple of lessons on the dashes (pp. 161-175), where a
distinction is drawn between the forms and functions of the em-dash and the
en-dash, and to a single lesson on the exclamation point (pp. 177-184), before
getting back to a lexical matter connected to the use of the comma, i.e. how
to punctuate the adverb “however” (pp. 185-191). Two long and articulate
lessons are then concerned with hyphens (pp. 195-219), through an overview of
the morphological contexts where hyphens are required or avoided. Three single
lessons focus on parentheses and square brackets (pp. 221-224), the period
(with a subsection on the ellipsis dots) (pp. 225-231) and the question mark
(pp. 233-239). Quotation marks are treated in two lessons (pp. 241-263), with
special attention to their position in relation to other marks. The last three
lessons are devoted to run-on sentences, i.e. independent sentences that are
not separated by any punctuation (p. 265), semicolons (pp. 267-278), and the
use of “and” and “but” at the beginning of a sentence (pp. 279-284).

EVALUATION

The book is a practical guide to English punctuation, designed for a broad
audience of people interested in the subject. It follows the path of many
previous popular books on punctuation that were a publishing success in the
last fifteen years, not only in English-speaking countries (see e.g. Truss
2003, Lukeman 2006, Huston 2013 for English; Millán 2005 for Spanish; Serafini
2012 for Italian). One of the main merits of this book in comparison to
similar works is the large-scale overview of British and American style
guides, whose main result is the recognition of the poor consistency about
punctuation norms. Most of the time, the author does not take a strong
position on questionable punctuational choices, but wisely advises the reader
to follow the style guide he adheres to.

In accordance with the destination of the book, the author has chosen to
employ a writing style that is quite far from academic conventions. Among the
many examples of this reader-friendly approach, some passages may be cited
where the author adopts an interactive style, directly addressing the reader
(“How about you? Are you always sure where to put commas and semicolons?”, p.
1; “If you’re like most of my students, you don’t love grammar jargon”, p. 17;
“Quick, if you walk into a McDonald’s, which would you rather see, a
man-eating chicken or a man eating chicken?”, p. 196). The quest for
interactivity is also clear in the presence in each lesson of rules of usage,
where the reader is directly advised, mainly through imperatives, about what
to do and what not to do with punctuation (“Don’t place a colon between a
preposition and its object”, p. 59; “Use hyphens to join initial letters to
words”, p. 205; “Feel free to open sentences with ‘and’ or ‘but’”, p. 283).
This stylistic choice is powerful and effective, and will certainly allow the
book to reach a wide readership, well beyond the scholarly community.

Another strong point of the book is the presence of a huge bulk of examples
for each of the punctuational phenomena taken into account. The examples are
taken from an impressive and varied number of sources, going from famous
historical figures such as Julius Caesar or Geoffrey Chaucer to stars of
modern show business such as Louis C. K. or Jennifer Lawrence. Most of the
examples are witty or funny, which makes the reading a quite enjoyable one.

Nevertheless, the book suffers from some shortcomings, both from a formal and
from a more substantial point of view, that jeopardize its overall quality, at
least to a certain extent. I shall now point out some of them.

To begin with, some criticism can be made about the selection of quotes. Some
of them are apparently taken from spoken texts, such as a sportscast (the use
of the exclamation point in “Holy cow!” by Harry Caray, p. 177), a film (the
use of the comma in “Whatever it is, I’m against it” by Groucho Marx in the
1932 film “Horse feathers”, p. 67) or a speech (the use of the comma in “We
campaign in poetry, but when we’re elected we’re forced to govern in prose” by
Mario Cuomo in a 1985 speech, p. 80). For some of these examples a previous
written text can be referred to, such as the screenplay of a film or the draft
of a speech, but the source indicated in brackets for each quote is always the
spoken text. It looks like, in this case, the author has simply selected some
funny examples where, in his opinion, a certain punctuation mark would have
been used if the text were in a written form. This, of course, calls into
question the validity of the quote as a real example of usage of a punctuation
mark. Even if this book does not want to be a corpus linguistics study, some
more methodological rigor in the selection of examples would have been
desirable.

Another issue touching the use of quotes is that sometimes a pretty trivial
use of punctuation is exemplified by an excessive number of instances, such as
in lesson 20 on “Commas in Direct Address” (pp. 155-158). A very simple rule
prescribing the use of the comma with vocatives is accompanied by 17 examples,
definitely too many for the case under discussion. Moreover, one of the
examples in this lesson does not seem relevant, since no vocative – and no
comma – is present: “Who is this lady you have shrunk?” from the 2006 film
“Borat” (p. 156).

The didactic value of quizzes is also largely questionable, since their level
of difficulty is considerably lower than what is needed for an effective
reinforcement of the rules given in the lesson. A couple of examples will
suffice to illustrate this point. In the lesson on the colon (p. 62), after
giving a rule on the use of the colon or the comma before short quotations, a
quiz is proposed where the reader is asked to choose among three options: with
the comma, with the colon or without any mark. In the lesson on “however” (p.
190), a very clear rule prescribing to avoid the use of double commas around
the adverb is checked through a quiz where there are only two options: one
where “however” is preceded by a period and followed by a comma, and one where
it is enclosed by a couple of commas. In both cases, the answer is obvious and
does not really help the reader strengthen his/her knowledge; a more
challenging quiz would have served the didactic purpose of the book better.

One of the major critical points on the formal side is that the book does not
look well-structured. Lessons are merged into larger sections with a unifying
title, but their distribution is not clear at all. For example, under the
title “Apostrophes” the table of contents lists four lessons that are indeed
devoted to the apostrophe, but also a fifth lesson on the colon (p. viii); and
the section on “Dashes” groups together two lessons on the em-dash and the
en-dash, but also a lesson on the exclamation point and a lesson on the use of
“however” (p. xi). Probably, this problem is simply due to careless
typographic work on the organization of the table of contents by the
publisher; we can quite easily infer that the intention of the author was to
group together in larger sections all those lessons that are devoted to the
same punctuation mark, leaving out of these sections all the isolated lessons
on a specific mark or phenomenon. Anyway, this aspect should have been taken
care of more accurately, particularly in the light of the broad and
non-specialist audience the book is designed to reach.

Another minor shortcoming that is probably due to poor editing concerns the
“Notes” section at the end of the book. The text of the notes of lessons 30-32
is not displayed at the end of the book; there is a sudden shift from the
notes of lesson 29 on p. 301 to the notes of lesson 33 on p. 302.

A more serious problem that has to do again with the overall structure of the
book is that there is no consistency in the order of chapters. It is quite
puzzling, for example, that two punctuation marks displaying many usage
similarities as the exclamation point and the question mark are far from one
another, and that the main marks that perform the segmentation of the text in
smaller units (period, semicolon, colon, comma) are not grouped into a single
section, but scattered all over the book. Quite inconsistent and not linear is
also the distribution of the lesson about “however”, which should belong to
the section on the comma, and of the lesson about starting sentences with
“and” or “but”, that is actually a sub-topic of the usage of the period. These
distributional choices make it harder for the reader – all the more so for a
non-specialist one – to understand the behavior of punctuation as a system,
and not simply as a set of signs.

This issue brings me on to what is probably the weakest point of the book. The
content of the volume does not seem to be underpinned by a clear-cut
theoretical model of punctuation. In the introduction, the author mentions two
possible motivations guiding the use of punctuation by writers, i.e. “to make
grammatical sense” and “to reproduce the rhythms of speech” (p. 7). Some
recent research focused on Italian punctuation (cfr. mainly Ferrari et al.
2018) has shown that the explanatory power of grammatical and prosodic
principles is not entirely satisfying, and this holds true also for most
languages of Europe, including English (and excluding for example German,
where punctuation is mostly managed on a purely syntactic and formal basis).
Punctuation as a consistent system of signs can be better explained through a
communicative account, according to which the choice of a punctuation mark is
primarily connected to the construction of a coherent text by the writer, and
prosodic or syntactic regularities are only side effects of pragmatic and
textual indications. Such an approach would have been welcome throughout the
whole volume, especially in points where the author invokes the prosodic
category of “pause”. For example, when a comma separates an adjunct from a
main clause, it is said that the comma “marks a point where you would pause in
speaking the sentence aloud” (p. 70). This principle does not prove reliable
in the choice of the comma. When we write a sentence like “When in doubt, tell
the truth” (p. 67), the comma is employed if we want to put the adjunct aside
in a separate informational unit, whereas the absence of the comma means the
insertion of both elements in the same unit; no actual pause can be detected
when the sentence is read aloud. Moreover, the adequate category to be
employed in order to describe the prosodic correlate of the comma is not the
pause, as some experimental studies have shown, but the intonational category
of non-terminal prosodic break (cfr. Kirchhoff & Primus 2016, Ferrari 2017).
Another hint of the theoretical weakness of this work is the choice to treat
ellipses dots in the same lesson as the period (pp. 228-230), as if they were
a sort of replicated variant of it. In fact, it is fairly straightforward that
the ellipsis is a punctuation mark in its own right.

A final problematic point of the book, closely related to the latter, is the
placement of all punctuation marks on the same level, without a clear
hierarchy or taxonomy. It is somewhat surprising to find meaningful and
pragmatically rich uses of punctuation treated on a par with mechanical and
conventional uses, such as the ones involving the apostrophe, the hyphen or
the period in abbreviations. This is mainly due to the absence, in the
conception of the book, of a fruitful theoretical distinction such as that
between “word punctuation” and “sentence punctuation” we can find in the
French literature (see Catach 1994).

In conclusion, this volume offers a light and highly practical guide to
punctuation for non-experts, that can possibly work well for the intended
audience in the light of its witty, accessible style and abundance of
interesting examples. Nevertheless, it also has a considerable number of
flaws, both formal and substantial, and is not supported, as far as I can
judge, by a strong theoretical stance on linguistic models of punctuation.
These problematic issues do not make the volume particularly appealing for a
scholarly audience.

REFERENCES

Catach, Nina. 1994. La ponctuation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Ferrari, Angela. 2017. Leggere la virgola: una prima ricognizione. CHIMERA
4/2. 145-162.

Ferrari, Angela et al. 2018. La punteggiatura italiana contemporanea:
un’analisi comunicativo-testuale. Rome: Carocci.

Huston, Keith. 2013. Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols
& Other Typographical Marks. New York-London: Norton.

Kirchhoff, Frank & Beatrice Primus. 2016. Punctuation. In Vivian Cook & Des
Ryan (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System. London-New
York: Routledge. 93-109.

Lukeman, Noah. 2006. A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. New
York-London: Norton.

Millán, José Antonio. 2005. Perdón imposible: guía para una puntuación más
rica y consciente. Barcelona: Ariel.

Serafini, Francesca. 2012. Questo è il punto: istruzioni per l’uso della
punteggiatura. Rome-Bari: Laterza.

Spector, Stephen. 2015. May I Quote You on That? A Guide to Grammar & Usage.
Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press.

Truss, Lynne. 2003. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to
Punctuation. New York: Gotham Books.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

After earning his PhD at the University of Pavia (Italy) with a dissertation
on anaphoric encapsulation in written texts, Filippo Pecorari is currently a
postdoc researcher at the University of Basel (Switzerland), where he is
taking part in a project on Italian punctuation funded by the Swiss National
Science Foundation. He is also working as an adjunct lecturer in Linguistics
at the Universities of Basel and Pavia. His research interests are mainly
focused around text linguistics, pragmatics and Italian linguistics.





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