Learning outcomes

Why is punctuation important?
Choosing punctuation well is about communicating meaning precisely. When we speak, we can rely on gesture, tone of voice and body language to make ourselves understood. There is often a shared context; those involved are usually present, unless it is a phone or conference call. Everyday speech will often be fragmented and rarely be in complete sentences, and if the meaning is unclear it can be immediately clarified.
The distinction between speech and writing is, of course, more blurred than this. Take for example a lecture or presentation; or the rehearsed speech you give when you have something difficult to communicate; or a message left on voicemail. These will be less spontaneous and may be carefully prepared. They can also be dynamic and can be altered and changed by content, tone and gesture in response to the reaction of the audience. Answerphone messages can be re-recorded. Writers, of course, do not have the same opportunity to change what they have written, unless they are publishing on the web. Once a piece of writing is printed, there is little opportunity for revision.
The careful use of punctuation is one of many skills that writers need if they are to communicate clearly in writing: it is more than memorising and applying a set of rules. Used well, punctuation allows certain words, phrases and clauses to be emphasised and can make subtle or major changes to meaning. Thus, the same words may be given different meanings through varying the punctuation marks.
Look at the sentence below. What does it tell you?
Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off.
Now look at the same sentence, but with a semi-colon and a comma added:
Charles the First walked and talked; half an hour after, his head was cut off.
Without accurate punctuation, the same words can convey different meanings. Look at the two sentences below:
I saw a man eating tiger.
The host stood at the door and called the guests names.
As they stand, the sentences are grammatically accurate, but if we change the punctuation we can make them mean something quite different:
I saw a man-eating tiger.
The host stood at the door and called the guests’ names.
Punctuation can be used to separate items and to draw them together. In the first example, the insertion of a hyphen between man and tiger brings the two words together and changes the meaning of the sentence. In the second, the apostrophe after guests shows that the names belonging to the guests were announced, rather than that the host insulted his visitors. Crystal explains:
Punctuation marks are the main means of showing the grammatical organisation of what you write. Hide the punctuation and you hide the grammatical structure. And if you hide the grammatical structure, you hide the meaning of what you are trying to say.
(1996, p.151)
Put another way, punctuation can help us to resolve some of the ambiguities in a text. Graddol et al. (1996, p.63) describe punctuation as guiding the reader’s interpretation of a text. Using it accurately is an integral part of ensuring that the reader understands what you are trying to convey. It tells us who is speaking, and exactly what they say. It indicates the status of the writing: a sentence ending in an exclamation mark is read very differently from a sentence with a question mark.
The rules of punctuation are, however, not completely fixed. Just as spelling and pronunciation have changed over the years, so has punctuation. While some punctuation is correct or incorrect, more sophisticated uses can be a matter of choice or style. There will be times when we can choose between full stops, commas, colons and semi-colons; we can choose when to use exclamation marks, or decide to substitute brackets for dashes.
Text messages are rarely punctuated, and sophisticated punctuation is actively discouraged. A number of blogs suggest that using a semi-colon in a text shows that the message has been too thought-out, revised, and over-edited. Or to put it another way, a semi-colon in a text message is the equivalent of putting on makeup to go to the gym (Greenspan, 2011).