Visible Language

This introduction to this special issue of Visible Language examines why, and in what circumstances, punctuation may become visible: when especially does it come into view and demand our attention? While punctuation marks are, of course, visible signs, when they are functioning according to our expectations (and sometimes even when defying them), they can be barely noticed. The essay begins with discussion of a passage from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit in which a character’s punctuation is referred to. This serves as a starting point for identifying a number of questions raised by such visibility, matters that are developed further, and variously, by the essays that follow. These include: punctuation’s roles in articulating grammar and suggesting orality; what punctuation may tell us about views on education and literacy; defining punctuation; its historical visibility or invisibility; its variation according to technological change; and its iconic and figurative potential.

In a literary form such as the comic that combines images and text, punctuation is likely to play a specific role. From the comic’s invention at the beginning of the 19th century, creators like Töpffer or Doré played with punctuation, especially the expressive signs, imitating what was happening at the same time in numerous novels. The habit of overloading the images with exclamation and interrogation marks or dashes led progressively, however, to saturation during the golden age of superhero comics and therefore to a sort of punctuation crisis. There was increased questioning as to the ideological meaning of such signs: a rethinking of what punctuation meant. Nowadays graphic novelists tend to invent new uses for the signs, making language newly visible with interesting effects.

Communication is increasingly taking place through written messaging using online and mobile platforms such as email, instant messaging and text messaging. A number of scholars have considered whether these texts reflect spoken or written language, though less is known about the role of punctuation. In fact, it is commonly assumed that punctuation on such platforms is either random or absent. This study explores the nature of punctuation (including emoticons) in electronically-mediated communication by analyzing sets of focus group data from adolescents discussing text messaging and by assessing a corpus of text messages sent by university students. Some usage patterns are gender-based. More generally, there is evidence that young people are developing coherent strategies for how such marks should be used in messages created on new digital media.

At first sight the speech mark would seem to be one of the easiest to use of all punctuation marks. After all, all one has to do is take the piece of speech or written language and surround it with the appropriately shaped marks. But, are speech marks as easy to understand and use as suggested above, especially for young children beginning their punctuation careers? Some readers may well at this point be asking, ‘But what is a speech mark?’ It is a good question, firstly, because outside of the UK the term is hardly ever used and secondly, because the term is extremely recent. The speech mark is simply an alternative title for those punctuation marks used to frame speech or quotation in written language and it is the latest in a long line of terms used to name them.

The essay presents a revised history of the punctuation mark [ “ ], drawn from the earliest communities who made it their own. By situating the development of [ “ ] in its historical context, from first uses of the diple [ > ] by the Greek scholar Aristarchus, it explains how it was the general applications which persisted into the sixteenth century and beyond, before the mark finally settled into its modern use to enclose quotations. While literary and bibliographical scholars have suggested that emphatic marking was primarily attached to rhetorical figures as sententia, it is shown that printed marks were used by authors to achieve a rich variety of semantic effects and by their readers to create personal editions.
Beginning with a modern comparison, the adoption of [ / ] as a new mark of punctuation for modern British drama, the essay explains how peculiarities in the deployment of [ “ ] in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts—including works as central to the literary canon as Shakespeare’s Hamlet—are situated at a transition point between a small or ‘privy’ group and what the Shakespeare folio called ‘the great variety of readers.’

The article offers two approaches to the question of ‘invisible punctuation,’ theoretical and critical. The first is a taxonomy of modes of punctuational invisibility, identifying denial, repression, habituation, error and absence. Each is briefly discussed and some relations with technologies of reading are considered. The second considers paragraphing, or lack of it, in Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: one of the two early printed editions and at least one of the two MSS are monoparagraphic, a feature always silently eliminated by editors as a supposed carelessness. It is argued that this is improbable and that one form the Defence may have taken at Sidney’s hands (and those of his literary executors) was monoparagraphic, a matter affecting the tone, genre and the understanding of his argument. A short conclusion considers the current state of punctuational invisibility in relation to digital awareness.

Dictionary compilers and designers use punctuation to structure and clarify entries and to encode information. Dictionaries with a relatively simple structure can have simple typography and simple punctuation; as dictionaries grew more complex, and encountered the space constraints of the printed page, complex encoding systems were developed, using punctuation and symbols. Two recent trends have emerged in dictionary design: to eliminate punctuation, and sometimes to use a larger number of fonts, so that the boundaries between elements are indicated by font change, not punctuation.