90 English Grammar Demystifi ed
After reading the preceding sentence, are you convinced that punctuation and
spacing are absolute necessities? In fact, it has taken many, many years to reach this
conclusion. Indeed, before the ninth century A.D., very early writing did not even
require space between words. Some credit the Romans with using dots between
words, while medieval scribes used pictures of birds, fl owers, and daggers or other
marks to indicate a pause. Since rhetoric, the study of oratory or public speaking,
was an important course of study, early punctuation was not based on sentence
structure, but rather on how a manuscript could be made readable.
The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1436 was the stim-
ulus for a new system of punctuation. To reach larger and larger audiences, books
needed to be readable. Although earlier medieval writers used marks to show where
a reader might pause, their punctuation was different from today’s punctuation. One
slash mark indicated a short pause and three indicated a long pause. Aldus Manutius
(1449–1515), the Renaissance printer, used a period to indicate a full stop at the end
of a sentence and a diagonal slash to represent a pause. For another two hundred
years, printers experimented with various symbols, but it was not until the late
1600s and early 1700s that punctuation became consistent. Dr. Ben Jonson, a dra-
matist, authored English Grammar in 1617 (published in 1640 after his death), in
which punctuation was used syntactically, or according to sentence structure.
Although the way Dr. Jonson explained the need for punctuation might not be very
clear today, it is instructive:
For, whereas our breath is by nature so short, that we cannot continue
without a stay to speake long together; it was thought necessarie, as well
as for the speakers ease, as for the plainer deliverance of things spoken, to
invent this meanes, whereby men pausing a pretty while, the whole speech
might never the worse be understood.Translation: Punctuation makes a sentence easier to understand.
That brings us to a particular, present-day problem. Is it acceptable to send an
e-mail without proper punctuation and capitalization? It all depends upon whether
you care what the recipient thinks about you as he or she reads your message. Lack
of punctuation and capitalization may speak to some recipients as a lack of educa-
tion, intelligence, and professionalism. You need to decide if this matters to you.
Certainly, any business e-mail you send should have the same high standards you
maintain in anything else you might write and sign. So let’s start where the elders
started—with end marks.