One of the most important punctuation marks goes about quietly, doing its job without any notice or fanfare. It’s also the oldest of all punctuation marks, dating back to ancient Greece. It’s used a thousand times in every book. As Noah Lukeman (
A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation, 2006) suggests, “…it alone can make or break a work.”
What is it? The paragraph break! Once upon a time, reading was hard work. There was no punctuation, no white-space, no lower case letters. There was nothing to indicate when one thought ended and the next one began.
The pilcrow was the first punctuation mark. The word originated from the Greek paragraphos, (para=beside and graphos=to write). This led to the Old French, paragraph. This evolved into pelagraphe, and then to pelegreffe. Middle English transformed it into pylcrafte, and finally to pilcrow.
Around 200 AD, paragraphs were very loosely understood as a change in topic, speaker, or stanza. But there was no consistency in these markings. Initially, some used the letter
K, for
Kaput, which is Latin for head. By the 12th century, scribes began using
C, for
Capitulum, Latin for little head or chapter. This
C evolved because of inconsistencies in handwriting. By late medieval time, the pilcrow was a very elaborate decoration in bright red ink inserted in between shapeless paragraphs.
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| Villanova, Rudimenta Grammaticæ. Published 1500 in Valencia (Spain).. Licensed under Public Domain |
As printing technology improved, and whitespace was deemed valuable in the reading process, pilcrows were dropped down to indicate a new line. Eventually the pilcrows were abandoned, and the paragraph indent was born. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that a standard method was devised to help organize paragraphs. Alexander Bain introduced the modern paragraph in 1866, defining it as a single unit of thought, and stressing the importance of an explicit topic sentence.
Just as a period divides sentences, a paragraph divides groups of sentences. But as the period is often hailed as the backbone of punctuation, the paragraph break is largely ignored.
The primary purpose of a paragraph is to define a theme, but there are no standard rules that dictate how that process plays out. Paragraphs tend to be organic, subject to the writer’s idiosyncrasies.
Some of us have quite a few idiosyncrasies. <See what I did there?
In a perfect world, a paragraph has a beginning, the main point stated in an explicit topic sentence. It has a middle, in which the writer elaborates on this one main point. And it has an ending, which wraps the entire package in a neat bow.
But the world isn’t perfect. Sometimes the writer places the topic sentence as the last line of a paragraph, playing “gotcha” like a punchline of a joke. Sometimes the topic sentence is a mere whisper, implied in the action. And then there’s the prankster, who places the topic sentence in the middle of a paragraph. Blink and you miss it.
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Further complicating the process, there is no designated length that defines a paragraph. I have some students who insist that a paragraph be five sentences, even when the concept is so complex, it demands more explanation. They call this being succinct, but when I ask them for clarification, it takes them several minutes to explain one sentence. I remind them, succinct does not mean short. Succinct means precise. Meanwhile, some students go to the opposite extreme. They turn in five-page essays that are three – and sometimes less -- very long paragraphs. Their ideas trample over each other, undistinguished from each another, in one stampeding brain dump. Both of these writer types reflect a common issue: they don’t understand, and therefore are not connected to, their own ideas. As Lukeman states, messy breaks reveal messy thinking.
The long and short of it (and all puns intended), paragraphs affect pacing, showing the reader how to approach the text. This is especially true in fiction. Short paragraphs tend to be action-oriented, focusing on moving the plot forward. Long paragraphs slow the action down, and tend to be reflective, either setting the stage for the next chase or revealing character. Too many short paragraphs strung together can wear the reader out. Too many long paragraphs put him to sleep.
So what do I do?
I begin with the basics. I tell my students, first, do your thinking. While everyone is entitled to an opinion, not every opinion is equally weighted. In fact, some are distorted, misinformed, and downright wrong. Next, organize your thinking. Only then can you write it down. I provide a fixed pattern that the beginning writer can easily manage: 1. Write an explicit topic sentence; 2. Elaborate, in which you explain what you mean by this point, and why is it important; 3. Validate, in which you use evidence to prove that your observations are valid; 4. Illustrate, in which you demonstrate with examples how your observations can be applied in real world time. I compare beginning writers to beginning musicians. Musicians need to learn the notes and play the scales -- over and over and over -- in order to master them. Once they master these notes, only then can they play around, making their own music, and writing their own symphony.
But first, they have to learn the basics.
What do you think?
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My kitty, Comma.
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“What is one man’s colon is another man’s comma.” ~
Mark TwainAs a writing teacher, and a working writer, I found the greatest challenge is learning the fine art of punctuation. The secret, I discovered, is writing for the reader's eye.
Understanding how the reader approaches text offers you key insight into how to write with clarity and grace.
Readers approach the text by moving left to right. Readers interpret information by this forward projection. Readers expect subject-verb-object structures in sentences. They tend to focus on the verb that resolves the sentence's syntax, and in so doing, tend to resist information until after the verb is identified. This is why concrete subjects and action-oriented verbs carry the weight of the sentence. If the subject is vague or nonexistent, or the verb is passive, the sentence often falls apart.
Because readers project forward, they intuitively search for the subject, skimming over qualifying clauses or phrases that precede the subject. This becomes important in longer sentences, when the subject does not debut until mid-way or beyond. This is why subjects placed as close to the opening of the sentence as possible make for stronger sentences.
Active voice maintains this forward process. It originates with the grammatical subject, flows through the verb, and results in an outcome. Some research suggests that readers understand and remember information more readily when structure corresponds to this cause-effect sequence. Passive structure forces this action in reverse: a subject is either implied or supplied in a subordinate phrase, and the outcome becomes the grammatical subject.
The rhythm of a narrative is found in its punctuation. As sentences crash and fall “like the waves of the sea,” punctuation becomes the music of the language, says Noah Lukeman, in one of my favorite reads,
A Dash of Style (2006).
Periods are the stop signs, says Lukeman, and hold the most power in the punctuation universe.
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All other marks – the comma, the dash, the colon and semi-colon, and so on – serve only to modify what lies between the periods. Sometimes a usurper, like the exclamation point or the question mark, intervenes, but its control is temporary. Imagine a book without periods, or a book that has periods after every word, and you begin to understand its supreme power.
A well-placed period, especially in battle with one of its usurpers, helps pacing and adds emphasis. It speeds the narrative up in an action-sequence, heightening the drama. For example, can you hear the drum beat in this passage from my book,
Girls of Gettysburg (Holiday House, 2014)?
Bayonets glistening in the hot sun, the wall of men stepped off the rise in perfect order. The cannoneers cheered as the soldiers moved through the artillery line, into the open fields.
The line had advanced less than two hundred yards when the Federals sent shell after shall howling into their midst.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The shells exploded, leaving holes where the earth had been. Shells pummeled the marching men. As one man fell in the front of the line, another stepped up to take his place. Smoke billowed into a curtain of white, thick and heavy as fog, stalking them across the field.
Still they marched on. They held their fire, waiting for the order.
Boom! A riderless horse, wide-eyed and bloodied, emerged from the cloud of smoke. It screamed in panic as another shell exploded.
Boom! All around lay the dead and dying. There seemed more dead than living now. Men fell legless, headless, armless, black with burns and red with blood.
Boom! They very earth shook with the terrible hellfire.
Still they marched on.
Long sentences can be very effective to heighten emotional drama even as it slows the action down. In another example from
Girls of Gettysburg: “
Dawn broke still as pond water, and the army was already on the march, moving east along the Pike. As the bloody sun broke free of the horizon, the mist rose, too. The air heated steadily, another hellfire day.”
But, as the cliché reminds us, there can be too much of a good thing (except chocolate, of course). A string of short sentences can become a choppy ride.
Like riding in a Model T Ford. Stuck in the wrong gear. Chug! Chug! Chug! Going over a rutted road. It bounces. And bounces. And bounces. My head hurts. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Stop. This. Car. And. Let. Me. Out. And no one wants to read a sentence that never ends, one that goes on and on and on and on, in some stream-of-consciousness rambling of fanciful swooping and looping and drooping that serves no purpose other than to satisfy the writer’s ego.If the period is the stop sign, then the comma is the speed bump, says Lukeman. It controls the ebb and flow of the sentence’s rhythm. A comma connects and divides. In fact, as Lukeman warns, it’s downright schizophrenic. It divides the sentences into parts, clarifying its meaning, or in some cases, changing its meaning. Consider this favorite Facebook meme:
A woman, without her man, is nothing. But, with a wave of the magic punctuation wand, it changes to this: A woman: without her, man is nothing.A comma connects smaller ideas to create a more powerful idea:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.Everyone has heard the saying, placing a comma is like taking a breath in a sentence. But a sentence with too many commas sends the reader into hyperventilation. And one with not enough commas forces the reader to hold her breath unto she turns
blue. So, where do you place your comma?
There are a thousand handbooks on punctuation, each offering a thousand rules on where and when to place a comma, and each rule has a thousand exceptions.
Perhaps the better question is: what is your purpose in using the comma? As a stylistic devise, I offer that it’s one of the most emotive punctuation marks because it mimics the character’s state of mind. For example, from my
Girls of Gettysburg, you know this poor character is frightened: “
Weezy sang, quiet as a cricket’s whisper. But in the tiny room, in the dark, it seemed loud enough.”
Somewhere between the period and the comma is the semi-colon. This is the mediator, says Lukeman, and “
a bridge between the two worlds.” With a style all its own, the semi-colon connects two thematically-related ideas while maintaining the independence of both.
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It can be used to smooth out the choppy ride found in a string of short sentences, or give a breath of air in a long-winded sentence.
However, the semi-colon doesn’t always play well with others. It competes for attention with the comma. Because a semi-colon slows the action down, the effect of a comma and, most especially the period, is minimized.
And then there are colons. Colons are just plain bossy. They don't like to share. They especially don’t like semi-colons, despite the similar names. With a flair for the dramatic, colons are the master magicians: they reveal. (<
See what I did there?) Colons hold the audience in suspense, says Lukeman. Then, at the right moment, the writer pulls the curtain back to reveal some fundamental truth of the narrative. Remember the Facebook meme example?
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
But too often misunderstood and underappreciated, the colon tends to be reduced to mundane tasks, like signaling lists and offering summaries.
Then, of course, there are the dashes, ellipses, slashes and myriad of other punctuation marks. Alas, I’ve run out of space. In the end, as Noah Lukeman says, punctuation is organic, a complex universe subject to the writer’s purpose and personal tastes. What works in one narrative doesn’t work in every narrative. And for every rule, there is an exception. At its core, however, punctuation is a journey of self-awareness and reveals as much about the writer as it does about the writing.
For more information, you might find these useful:
Boyle, Toni and K.D. Sullivan. The Gremlins of Grammar. NY: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Lukeman, Noah. A Dash of Style. NY: WW Norton, 2006.
Bobbi Miller “Punctuation in skilled hands is a remarkably subtle system of signals, signs, symbols and winks that keep readers on the smoothest road. Too subtle, perhaps: Has any critic or reviewer ever praised an author for being a master of punctuation, a virtuoso of commas? Has anyone every won a Pulitzer, much less a Nobel, for elegant distinctions between dash and colon, semi-colon and comma? ~ Rene J. Cappon, Associated Press Guide to Punctuation
