Punctuation as a Rhetoric Tool
How can punctuations help sentences say what a writer intends them to say?
The Times of London reported:
Please note, that in the above sentence an additional comma would prevent Nelson Mandela from being a dildo collector, but he could conceivably still be an 800-year-old demigod.
Before we delve deep, let me make my point by giving you one more example. Here you have a love letter that Jill wrote to Jack:
Dear Jack,
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy — will you let me be yours?
Jill
Now this love story has a little villain, John, who wanted Jill all for himself. Like all villains he had powers. He was good with punctuations. So without changing a word in the above letter, this is what he did:
Dear Jack,
I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn! For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours,
Jill
(Truss 9)
Looking at these two examples and from your earlier readings one might take that punctuation are little things that can make an otherwise usual sentence little funny by distorting their meaning. You might think that they are of little significance. But history gives them the place they deserve. One of the biggest events in world history — the Russian revolution — was precipitated when Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters.
Now, to understand punctuation, we need to understand all the grammatical conventions that dictate its usage, follow manuals of style and be guided by writing handbooks, that tell us all the systematized rules that we need to follow. This is the way we have been always taught. Go read. Learn. By-heart. However, experts on punctuation like Lynne Truss and John Dawkins tell us that there is a simple system underlying usage of punctuation that enables writers to achieve important — even subtle — rhetoric effects.
Dawkins says that punctuations do not follow set rules that’ll tell us what is the right usage every time but they follow a set of functional principles. Good writers use these principles to convey their intended meaning, with their intended emphasis. As writers we want the reader to focus on some parts more than the other. We want to guide our readers into the by-lanes of our writing — hold their attention, make them pause, present ideas in succession.
To understand the functional principles of punctuation we need to familiarise ourselves with the basics of independent clauses. Identifying the independent clause is very important for the writer, as they help them break their sentence into meaningful little parts, arrange them, and join or separate them using different punctuation marks.
Independent clauses are the basic elements of prose. Any written or spoken discourse consists of independent clauses or underlying independent clauses. An independent clause has a subject and a predicate and expresses a complete thought. If prose is a concatenation of independent clauses then punctuation shows an appropriate relationship between them.
A good writer, thus, doesn’t just puts words on paper but composes them with punctuation, arranges them in a comprehensible order, creating his own rhythm and tempo. Following some simple rights and wrongs — apostrophes should be where they should be — writers can use a good ear, follow certain functional principles and stitch the fabric of language using punctuations. If this stitching is strong; readers will comprehend better. However, the consequences of mispunctuation are very evident:
A woman, without her man, is nothing.
(Feminists are already flaring their nostrils.)
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
(Maybe the writer isn’t a misogynist but just someone with poor punctuations who misplaced the colon with a comma.)
Punctuations are designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling. For more practical purposes one can look at punctuations as the traffic signal of languages: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop (Olsen 1).
Let us now briefly discuss some of the most used punctuation marks.
Comma
The comma tells you to pause.
It was first used by Greek dramatists two thousand years ago to guide actors between breathing points, indicating pauses, accentuating matters of sense and sound (Truss 72). In the traffic light analogy, it is like the blinking yellow light that tells a driver to slow down and proceed with caution (Olsen 4). Writers can try reading their prose aloud and insert a comma where there seems to be a clear pause in the sentence. The only thing that one needs to keep in mind is the intended meaning.
In the following sentences observe the intended meaning and the meaning conveyed through the sentence:
1. No dogs please.
(This is a gross generalization, since many dogs do please, and some rather make a point of it.)
2. Ankur walked on his head, a little higher than usual.
(The comma has been misplaced and belongs after “on”.)
3. The driver managed to escape from the vehicle before it sank and swam to the river-bank.
(It suggests that the vehicle swam to the river-bank, rather than the driver. The comma should be placed after “sank”.)
4. The convict said the judge is mad.
(The above sentence makes perfect sense unless what is intended is: “The convict, said the judge, is mad.”)
A wrongly placed comma, other than being a funny thing, can cause huge doctrinal differences in your religious beliefs. In the following example, see how Protestants and Catholics use different versions of the same sentence.
“Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”
“Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”
(Truss 74)
In the first version, Protestant interpretation skips over the Purgatory part and takes the crucified thief straight to heaven with the Lord. The second sentence promises Paradise at some later date and leaves Purgatory in the picture for Catholics.
Commas are also used for emphasis. For example:
Today John went to school.
The above sentence is completely right. But what if John went to school after being hospitalized for a year. The writer would want to emphasize on the context. He can do this by writing:
Today, John went to school.
What we can learn:
a. Commas divide items in a list. A comma is correct if it can be replaced by ‘and’ or ‘or’.
The rhetoric wiki on medium.com contains entries on various topics like art of argumentation, rhetoric of memory, subjectivity etc.
b. Commas join two complete sentences along with such conjunctions as and, or, but, while and yet.
They wanted the party to go on till the morning, but they grew tired and fell asleep.
c. Commas can be used in pairs to give additional information.
The students in the YIF, who managed to get language-realities, were very satisfied.
One last bit of advice: if your sentence is very short (perhaps 5 to 10 words), you do have the option of omitting the comma if you wish. Here is an example:
Mr. Santana is old and he is wise.
In such short sentences, one may opt to omit the comma. Remember, punctuation is meant to help the writer and the reader, not to make their jobs more difficult.
Colon
A Colon introduces.
It can introduce just about anything: a word, a phrase, a sentence, a quotation, or a list.
Jesse has only one thing on his mind: he wants to get rich.
Jesse has three things on his mind: money, psychedelics, and fame.
Colon delivers what the preceding words promise and gives special emphasis to whatever you’re introducing. Readers must first come to a stop, and then expect something that must balance the preceding part (Truss 114). For example, let’s say you are writing a letter describing a product, and you want to emphasize above all that this product, the Alexa toaster, is reliable. You could very well write:
The Alexa toaster beats its competitors especially in the key area of reliability.
While this sentence gets the point across, it doesn’t place much emphasis on reliability. A sentence using a colon is much more emphatic:
The Alexa toaster beats its competitors especially in one key area: reliability.
Test: To see if you are rightly using a colon substitute it with the word namely; if the sentence reads through smoothly, then there’s a good chance that you do need a colon.
Caution: Do not place a colon after a verb, as the verb itself introduces. For example, you would not write:
My three favorite movies are: Harry Potter, Twilight, and Transformers.
Semicolon
A semicolon is used to connect two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as ‘and’ or ‘but’.
Each of the sides of a semicolon holds two complete sentences and makes your reader take notice of the relationship between them. They help the writer create an abstract relationship between the two parts of the sentence, and therefore between two ideas.
Martin is a good typist; he makes few mistakes.
Crude oil is the thing of the past; electric cars and bikes are cheap and accessible.
In the above two examples, sentences are glued together by a semicolon. The second part of each sentence adds something to what the first part said; it comments on it. If these sentences are written as two different sentences separated by a period the reader must stop at the period of the first sentence and then begin to read the second; with two sentences connected by a semicolon, the reader does not come to a full stop and, therefore, the relationship seems that much closer. Here, for example, it need not be explicitly mentioned that a good typist is one who makes few mistakes; joining the sentences using a semicolon creates that relationship in the readers' mind and they can understand that the criteria for someone being a good typist are the number of mistakes they make while typing.
A semicolon is also used as a super-comma, a kind of Special Policeman in the fight of commas. In the below example notice how semicolon gracefully joins sentences together and calls a bunch of brawling commas to attention.
When they asked for my preferred location for the job, I gave them four cities: New York, New York, Mumbai, Maharashtra, Bangalore, Karnataka, and San Francisco, California.
This sentence contains so many commas, both between the members of the list and within them, that readers are likely to become confused.
When they asked for my preferred location for the job, I gave them four cities: New York, New York; Mumbai, Maharashtra; Bangalore, Karnataka; and San Francisco, California.
Notice how in the below examples the sense of the sentence changes with the punctuation marks:
Salim locked himself in the basement. India lost to Bangladesh.
The two statements can be unrelated. They merely tell two things that happened in the past.
Salim locked himself in the basement; India lost to Bangladesh.
We can say that the two events happened at the same time, although there is a possibility that Salim still doesn’t know the outcome of the game as he couldn’t bear to watch the match and locked himself long before the match actually ended.
Salim locked himself in the basement: India lost to Bangladesh.
Here the meaning is much clearer as there is a direct relationship between Salim locking himself up and India losing the match.
Dashes
Dashes are used to connect groups of words to other groups or for separating words in the middle of a sentence.
A dash creates a dramatic disjunction which can be exploited by the writer for humor, drama or shock. It is like a whisper that tells the reader to ‘wait for it’.
RBI Governor’s prescription for the economy, lower interest rates, higher employment, and less government spending, was rejected by the PMO.
RBI Governor’s prescription for the economy — lower interest rates, higher employment, and less government spending — was rejected by the PMO.
The second sentence is much clearer than the first one because the dashes clearly mark where the component begins and ends, whereas the reader might become confused by all the commas in the first.
Dashes are also used to add words to the end of a sentence when there is a clear break in the continuity of the sentence. Here are two examples:
PM Modi will be unable to win enough votes for another term of office — unless, of course, he can reduce unemployment and the deficit simultaneously.
Weather department had predicted decent rainfall this year–although, global warming is on the rise, glaciers are melting, and low lying coastal areas are constantly flooded.
Use dashes sparingly — only for those occasions when you wish to show special emphasis–too many of these can clutter your writing.
Hierarchy of Functional Punctuation Marks
Raising and Lowering
Depending on the hierarchy presented above, a writer can either increase or decrease the degree of separation between clauses (Dawkins 538).
Raising is increasing the degree of separation. For example, raising from a comma or semi-colon to a period.
Consider this sentence:
The very name hallucinates: Man’s country, out where the West begins.
Writer John Didion used raising to bring greater emphasis. He raises a colon and the comma to a period.
The very name hallucinates. Man’s country. Out where the West begins.
Lowering decreases the degree of separation or increases connectivity between the clauses. For example, lowering from a period to a semi-colon or comma.
Consider these four sentences. Punctuation marks gain emphasis for the attachment. The degree of emphasis depends upon the hierarchy of the punctuation mark i.e. higher the mark greater the emphasis.
1. John asked for a date when he got the nerve.
2. John asked for a date, when he got the nerve.
3. John asked for a date–when he got the nerve.
4. John asked for a date. When he got the nerve.
Teaching Punctuation
To learn punctuation, we can look at writing as a process.
The student doesn’t try to match his sentences with a rule in a handbook but rather responds to it in a behavioral sense. They should read the sentence keeping their intentions in mind and the reader’s need, and then decide on the basis of intended meaning and emphasis. Such an approach allows for individual differences in its application and each student can have their own learning curves (Dawkins 544).
When should I check my grammar and punctuation?
One should concern with grammar and punctuation after they are done with their first draft i.e. they have all their ideas organized and down on paper. Going back and looking at each sentence: how they sound, are they clear, can slow down your writing and thinking. After reading your draft, if you find out that your words do not convey what you had in your mind, you might want to go back and tweak your punctuation or sentence construction.
How can I work to improve my grammar and punctuation?
Read.
Every time you read, pay attention to grammar conventions. Where are these authors placing commas? How are they using punctuation to separate sentences, phrases, or ideas? How are they formatting lists, quotations, or long sentences? With a good eye and a good ear, one can use the structures used by these writers as models when you write. The more you read, the more you will be able to recognize and adopt effective uses of grammar and punctuation.
Other Resources:
- Video explaining the differences between the usage of semicolons and colons:
2. Ted-ed lessons on punctuation:
References
Dawkins, John. “Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 46, no. 4, 1995, pp. 533–548. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/358327.
Olsen, Gary A. “Punctuation Made Simple.” Punctuation Made Simple: An Introduction. N.p., 29 July 2011. Web. 14 Mar. 2019.
Truss, Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves : the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. New York :Gotham Books, 2004. Print.
