Lack of Punctuation

Chardy

Oldnproud

There's a big difference between 'Let's eat, Grandma' and 'Let's eat Grandma'!

There is, but with that particular example, we manage perfectly well without any punctuation, or even a pause, in speech. 😁

I find that these days when listening to the News on R4, there is little or no pause between items, thus making it awkward to follow. If they say 'in France today', is that referring to the last item, or the next? I stop and think, and miss the next bit!!

Ok, I have to concede that that's true.

I'm having problems with an audiobook at the moment, and I am forever having to replay the previous 30 seconds to try to clarify what has been said or what was meant, in the absence of any visual punctuation.

It has crossed my mind several times that I would probably fare much better with the actual printed text in front of me -as long as it had been properly edited and proofread.

OldandProud, I know I will never achieve punctuation perfection. However, I will continue to try, despite my ongoing brain fog. 🥴

My previous response was meant to be tongue in cheek. No need to apologise.

Marydoll

As soon as I see a long unpunctuated post, without paragraphs, I don't read it. It hurts my eyes, trying to decipher it.
It is a pity, because it actually could be worth reading.

There was a poster on GN, who never used capital letters and as a fully paid up pedant, it seriously irritated me!

Even more annoying than no capital letters is a post with all capital letters I think. There’s a man on one of my Facebook groups who types everything in capitals, and it really puts my back up because it feels like he’s shouting and thinks his opinions are more important than everybody else’s.

Not on my phone GSM. Unlike you to assume.

This post comes up constantly,don't read the unpunctuated posts if they annoy you or how about PMing the writer with all their corrections.
Not everyone who posts had a PhD in Grammar or Latin and I know of two very interesting posters who have stopped because of this kind of comment.
Personally I couldn't give a monkeys ,I can't spell, my grammar is appalling and my very strong regional accent affects my sentence construction. I have a condition that I was born with and can do nothing about. My spell check has packed in so all the pedants read at your peril.

i can usually manage to read most posts punctuation or not
but
it would help if they were spaced
by use of
the return key

ps
if all capitals equates to shouting
perhaps lack of them
might be
whispering
maybe

When I learned to type business letters they were heavily peppered with superfluous punctuation:

14th May, 1971.

Mrs. D. J. Smith,
42, Elm Street,
LITTLETON.

Dear Mrs. Smith,

I've always understood the purpose of punctuation in the written word is to give absolute clarity to the meaning of what is written; to remove ambiguity.

I feel that part of the problem today is that for many years in schools primacy was given to 'meaning' in the written word but at the expense of formal teaching of the dreaded SPG (Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar) . Consequently many teachers themselves weren't taught it formally and couldn't teach correct punctuation to their pupils because they didn't know it themselves.

The attempt to reintroduce formal teaching of SPG fell rather flat, I felt, because it was over elaborate and concentrated on elements which children didn't really need to know. Like those dreaded 'fronted adverbials'

What distresses me is the absence of prosody when people are reading from a script, but, to be fair, when we did 'reading round the class' when I was at school, in the 50s & 60s, we weren't really taught prosody either and many of my fellow pupils couldn't put any expression into what they were reading.

Even some actors don't seem to be able to read a piece of prose, either. Which is why some audio books are frustrating.
At the place where I volunteer we had a professional actor in one year for a reading of Dicken's 'Christmas Carol'. He was excruciatingly bad...

Nell8

When I learned to type business letters they were heavily peppered with superfluous punctuation:

14th May, 1971.

Mrs. D. J. Smith,
42, Elm Street,
LITTLETON.

Dear Mrs. Smith,

I don't think it was superfluous at all. The purpose of all those full stops is to indicate that a word has been shortened. Not particularly necessary , I admit, because most of us would know .that anyway, but its a long standing purposeful convention.

MaizieD

It is a very long time ago now but I still remember when the company I worked for decided to adopt open punctuation and a simplified layout. I think it was linked to Post Office recommendations for addressing envelopes. Line indentations and underlining went out along with lots of dots and commas! It was important to use correct spacing to avoid ambiguity, particularly with addresses.

I wonder how much time I saved over the years by omitting thousands of little specks of type!

Bella23....Terrific. More power to your elbow.

I was just being pedantic, Nell8

Talking about lack of punctuation, this is a signboard in a village:
Ducks in middle of road please drive carefully.
Depends how you read it...!

Nell8

When I learned to type business letters they were heavily peppered with superfluous punctuation:

14th May, 1971.

Mrs. D. J. Smith,
42, Elm Street,
LITTLETON.

Dear Mrs. Smith,

When I learned to type, we were taught that way, but also told that this was becoming obsolete and we were encouraged (for exam purposes) to use the "new" way, which was completely without commas or full stops.

We also aligned everything on the right. My mother, who learned to type in the 1930s, staggered the address, starting each line three spaces in from the one above.

I worked as a legal secretary and could never understand why, when engrossing documents, absolutelyNO punctuation at all was allowed. I was told this was to prevent misunderstandings. This didn't convince me, as, as we can see from the example above, a comma can be a life saver.

Is it still the case that legal documents are not allowed to contain punctuation?

To clarify: we aligned everything on the left. Sorry. I seem to be getting left and right confused more often these days.

Nell8

When I learned to type business letters they were heavily peppered with superfluous punctuation:

14th May, 1971.

Mrs. D. J. Smith,
42, Elm Street,
LITTLETON.

Dear Mrs. Smith,

To me, none of these commas are superflous, as that was the way I was taught to address letters and begin them.

I realise, however, that the rules of punctuation have changed since I left school.

In Sparklefizz' post for example, I would have inserted a comma before the word "but" in the second sentence, and one after "situations", but times change!

vintage1950

Talking about lack of punctuation, this is a signboard in a village:
Ducks in middle of road please drive carefully.
Depends how you read it...!

Oh, I must go there. I would so like to see a duck driving.

i like the sign in village hall,
after washing milk bottles will ladies kindly stand upside down in sink.

The city I lived in thought its name looked better in lowercase so the whole place was plastered with it spelt without a capital letter. Yet they complained about a restaurant that had a sign Medici with writing like the Medicis actually wrote their name.

welbeck

i like the sign in village hall,
after washing milk bottles will ladies kindly stand upside down in sink.

🤣🤣🤣

I too don't read long, unpunctuated screeds which, as welbeck says, would be greatly improved by the judicious use of the space bar.

I was taught punctuation and grammar at primary school in Scotland which has stayed with me ever since, although I never did learn exactly when to use a colon and when a semi-colon: I think we moved down to England before that lesson.

I remember the enormity of the crime of putting a comma before a conjunction; I still feel ill at the thought of putting a comma before "but" although I am reconciled to the Oxford Comma, which makes me feel quite dashing when I use it.

I had to Google "prosody" 🙂

Occasionally, when my arthritic wrist is uncooperative, I’ll use the microphone facility on my keyboard which doesn’t punctuate, apart from the odd full stop. Before posting, I check it and edit as necessary. Perhaps others use the microphone but then post or send without checking. .

I often argue with my husband about punctuation. He favours loads of semicolons, colons and the Oxford comma; while I like to keep punctuation to a minimum. I agree that punctuation is essential but I really hate the pepper pot method of sprinkling little dots and crescents all over a piece of writing. I use apostrophes through force of habit, although I fail to see the necessity to do so most of the time. I expect some of you will want to get the pepper pot out and punctuate what I have just written properly.

I completely agree.

I once had a manager, who insisted on sending out long, huge sentences, as one very large paragraph, with no punctuation at all, riddled with both grammatical and spelling errors (spell check?)

I once replied with, “comas are nice!” She seemed to have not the slightest idea of my meaning.

I try hard to check my typing and to include punctuation, though I’m far from perfect.

Oh god! I’ve done it again, of course I mean commas not comas! Sorry, very senior moment, where I tried to do two things at once, when I can clearly not even manage one! Very cross with myself for this gaff on this thread. 🫣🫣