Do Not Let The Period Die
I am the first to have fun with language, inventing words, and being enthusiastic about language’s life and evolution. We feel one with language because language changes with us. If it weren’t like that, we would have to substitute it for something else that would feel ours and language would be discarded.
In mysterious ways which explanation still remains pending, language has the two opposite, apparently contradictory conditions of permanence and variation.
The characteristic of permanence is what allows us to know what the other means. If signs would be changing permanently, communication would be impossible. We need shared signs in order to transmit meaning.
Variation, as I said before, makes language alive and it allows us to feel at ease with it.
This article, of course, is by no means comprehensive about all the aspects related to these two aspects. Today I only want to transmit the differences between the spoken and the written code to reflect on the endangered period. I believe that if we have this difference clear, our attitude (or our children’s attitude, or our children’s teachers’ attitude) towards the written code may improve.
Both written and spoken codes do change along the years. The changes in spoken language are evident enough not to stop on them right now. You know what I mean: you don’t talk like your grandparents, your parents, or your children. The changes in writing also happen and in great amount, but they change more slowly and they undergo a process of political judgment by the academic entity that works as police in each culture (for example the Real Academia Española in Spanish). To see considerable changes in Spanish writing, you have to compare books written with a one-hundred-year difference, more or less.
Spoken language works as it works without any individual intention behind it. It’s a collective phenomenon. New words appear and are accepted by the community, or they are quickly discarded by the community as a whole.
But written language works different, and changes must be authorized by academic authorities. If you think about this for a second, it makes lots of sense, because when we write something, we want that to last. That’s why we write it down, after all. And if we want it to last, we expect someone will not only understand it in the future, but also understand it in the same way. Too many changes in writing would prevent comprehension after an elapse of a few years.
Lately I am seeing that the symbol called period… you know, this one that I’m putting between brackets here:
(.)
is disappearing in adults’ writing. More and more often I am seeing that people only place a period at the end of the paragraph, using commas for all sentences separation within it.
The period and the comma have different functions in writing. All punctuation marks have a different function and they all serve the same purpose: to guide the reader’s mind and make comprehension easier. There are commas, periods, colons and semi-colons… and they have different functions.
I’m not including here a comprehensive guide about those marks either, simply because I would get really bored after that, but hey, periods separate sentences! Commas do not separate sentences.
Look at this example that I found recently:
“We had the big meeting today, with the personnel, things flowed easily.”
This text makes me stop and wonder. It gives me trouble and I need to think twice.
Did the writer mean:
“We had the big meeting today. With the personnel things flowed easily.”
or
“We had the big meeting today with the personnel. Things flowed easily.”
The two sentences above, although I accept they are similar, they are not identical in meaning. And that is what is wonderful about punctuation: they are the street lights of texts.
My nine-year-old son often answers me, “I don’t care about that!” when I correct his punctuation, spelling or syntax. And for what I’ve seen so far, his school teachers don’t care either. Also in on-line communities I see spelling and syntax overlooked. Lastly, and more astonishing to me, this happens in formal business correspondence too.
I enthusiastically support all changes that help comprehension or the changes that accompany our changes as human beings, but I invite you to reconsider the changes that make comprehension more difficult. To my eyes, choosing that change is a clumsy choice. Let us choose wisely!
March 6, 2010
Tags: punctuation, writing, written code Posted in: punctuation
One Response
Very well said. Thank you for those insights that you have shared. That is true. Using the right punctuation can make communication flow more easily and things are understood better.
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