Reading notes: 'Making a Point'
Enjoyable, with lots of information that is both broadening and fun to learn.
Some notes:
This is a good way to review the history of English literature. The early history of punctuation tells us a lot about Shakespeare (and vice versa), for example. Some of my instincts have been proven wrong. The author introduces a distinction between "Wordsworthian" authors and "Twainian" ones (these are some of Crystal's examples, but not his terms). Wordsworth (and others) didn't care much for the details of punctuation, trusting that to editors; Twain (and others) very much did care. I would have thought that Thomas Gray would have been a Twainian: according to my notes, his was a maximally contemplative Oxbridge life. He read the classics and published a dozen or so poems. But, according to Crystal, he was a Wordsworthian. So I need to revise my sense both of Gray and of the role of punctuation.
It's useful to remember how many choices have been made by the time we see a text. For many more lessons in this vein, I'd recommend P.J. Keegan's anthology of English poetry, which both preserves original spelling and presents poems in chronological order (and so not strictly grouped by author).
Approximately 23% of the way into the book, the reader starts to get something like an argument or thesis, instead of just an amusing history. Rather than rehashing a standard debate about prescriptivism vs descriptivism, Crystal lays out what I'd call a sociology of professional tensions. Different jobs have different goals, which makes their practitioners want different things from punctuation. Systematizers of punctuation have a hard time accounting for this, and wind up confused. Crystal's is both a compelling account of punctuation and an interesting category of account. Focusing on this sort of professional tension--related to, but not identical to, class tensions or personality clashes--is (I'd guess) much underrated. Interestingly, this tension or friction is not always about conflict: indeed, these people often want to defer to each other. Even so, because they're doing different (if overlapping) things, governed by different norms, we wind up with a lot of confusion and disagreement.
Crystal notes that for many decades, all punctuation manuals he knows of started with the comma, despite the fact that the period is more important. There are two reasons he sees: first, the comma indicates the smallest pause, and an impulse to start with the atomic led authors there. Second, that’s where the most problems were, so that’s where the author’s attention was. These are both general analytic pitfalls: it's a good idea to focus on the most granular level and on where the problems are, but it's easy to forget to look elsewhere. Moreover, resolving the atomic problems and the thorniest problems might require a solution that starts elsewhere.
The book is not intended as a writing guide, but attentive readers will probably improve their writing by reading it. The section on white space, for example, ought to benefit many of us. Few writers understand either that white space and section markings are a form of punctuation, or the benefits that come from treating them with care.
In the chapter on the question mark, and elsewhere, Crystal makes the striking, if obvious, point that there are places where our system of punctuation simply doesn’t work well. We so often take a string of words, treat it as fixed, and ask how it ought to be punctuated, as if punctuation weren't worthy to cause us to change that string of words. But strong writers work with and sometimes around the language in all sorts of ways, as when words that belong together semantically don't form the right pattern of stresses. It's nice to remember that punctuation can and should lead us to rephrase, and that choosing to rephrase doesn't mean we've failed a test of grammar.
One way Crystal helpfully blurs the distinction between prescription and description is by introducing some skepticism and humility—not that he would put it like this, but we are forced into a pragmatic approach because we (1) are trying to do many things with language, (2) we are imperfect and our tools are imperfect, and (3) everything we do is relative to expectations that vary over time and across people. I'm reminded of How to Do Things with Words, which makes trouble for the project of treating writing as presentations of propositions the way that Crystal makes trouble for the project of treating punctuation as a deterministic way of marking up the words and thoughts that exist prior to that punctuation.