else, how can there be any school at all?"1 c. With colon. "This will be the end of your refusing the loving compulsion of Almighty God: slavery to this world, and to the god of this world." 2 What makes this last addition unexpected, is that it resumes in brief form what has been fully given before, the this at the beginning of the sentence being primarily retrospective. Present General Status of Punctuation. - By way of premise it should be borne in mind that, well-furnished as it is, the existing scale of punctuation is by no means a complete representation of the pauses actually made in speaking or reading aloud. In every sentence there are rhetorical pauses that go unmarked and need no marking; they make themselves. And the more lucid and well organized the sentence, the more safely these pauses may be left to the reader. In a wellwritten passage the syntax dictates the place of the stops, and is not dependent on them. When a pause has to be lugged in to bolster up the construction, and above all when without the pause it would be left ambiguous or uncertain, the sentence itself is wrong, it needs amendment. Do not let the interpretation of an assertion depend upon a punctuation mark. The modern tendency is to reduce punctuation: cutting down semicoloned relations, where possible, to the comma, and leaving many of the comma pauses to the unmarked rhetorical pause. This is a good sign; because if to some extent it betokens carelessness of notation, to a broader extent it coexists with a better, more accurately articulated sentence structure. On the whole, it is because the modern sentence is so much improved that it is, and may be, left more safely to punctuate itself. ILLUSTRATIVE NOTE. - Professor Earle (English Prose, p. 107), in speaking of this modern reduction of the comma, illustrates the fuller 1 NEWMAN, Historical Sketches, Vol. iii, p. 6. punctuation of the older prose by the following passage from Hume's History of England in an edition of the year 1773: "The conspirators, hearing of Waltheof's departure, immediately concluded their design to be betrayed; and they flew to arms, before their schemes were ripe for execution, and before the arrival of the Danes, in whose aid they placed their chief confidence. The earl of Hereford was checked by Walter de Lacy, a great baron in those parts, who, supported by the bishop of Worcester and the abbot of Evesham, raised some forces, and prevented the earl from passing the Severne, or advancing into the heart of the kingdom. The earl of Norfolk was defeated at Fagadun, near Cambridge, by Odo, the regent, assisted by Richard de Bienfaite, and William de Warrenne, the two justiciaries." With this general reduction of punctuation the field is left clearer for special effects. Accordingly we find that in modern writing punctuation is a much more flexible thing, and more open to individualities of style, than was formerly the case. It may for greater stress be augmented, that is, pushed up from rhetorical pause to comma, from comma to semicolon; it may also be attenuated for greater rapidity. It is this skilful employment of punctuation as a flexible, living, artistic thing which makes it so truly a cardinal factor in the organism of the sentence. NOTE. This matter has already been presented in connection with Diction, p. 131, and in connection with Amplitude, p. 289. The exaggerated punctuation of the following sentences, for example, is not the old lumbering articulation of a century ago; it evinces the sense of greater importance and stress. "There would be real wild and domestic creatures, all of rare species; and a real slaughter." "1" Chance: or Providence! Chance or Wisdom, one with nature and man, reaching from end to end, through all time and all existence, orderly disposing all things, according to fixed periods, as he describes it, in terms very like certain well-known words of the book of Wisdom: - - those are the 'fenced opposites' of the speculative dilemma.”2 1 PATER, Marius the Epicurean, p. 178. III. MASSING OF ELEMENTS FOR FORCE. To determine the proper interrelation of sentence-elements we have had to approach the sentence analytically. Here, on the contrary, we enter upon a synthetic process, the process of making the assertion act together as a whole, precipitating its force, as it were, upon the point desired and with the exact stress desired. Thought moves thus in organized masses, both in attaining its own rounded fulness and in adjusting itself to other utterances. I. Distribution of Emphasis. In speech the points of emphasis are indicated by stress or intonation of the voice. The lack of this resource in writing is partially made up by the occasional use of italics, which, however, goes only a little way. Underlying all this, too, it is to be remembered that emphasis is a natural, not a manufactured thing; these external helps from voice and type do not create but only recognize and record it. The same thing is done more efficiently because more organically through the masterful arrangement of sentence-elements, an artistic procedure that justifies itself by being most effective when least realized. This, then, is the ideal seek so to place words that they will emphasize themselves; and do not make the interpretation of a sentence depend on the manner in which it is read. In order to get at the distribution of emphasis inside of the sentence or clause, we have to recognize by a disciplined tact the places where emphasis is most naturally concentrated, and as well also the intermediate or outlying tracts that have no special distinction.2 1 For the use of italics for stress, see above, pp. 128, 129. 2 For collocation in phraseology, and its relation to emphasis, see above, pp. 243, 244; for inversion and its objects, p. 277.—“ As, in an army on the march, the fight Outset and Culmination. The two great foci of emphasis, the beginning and the end, are here defined by the names outset and culmination, to indicate not only the fact but the kind of stress that belongs to these points respectively; a distinction determined by the sense of the fact that a sentence exists for the purpose of adding a new thought to the stock already presumably in the reader's possession. To the beginning belongs the stress due to the outset of attention, the natural initiation of the thought: namely, what is nearest in thought to the reader's inquiry, or to the core-idea of the previous sentence; and what is the best preliminary to the forward step which it is the business of the present sentence to take. Typically, this is the subject, as being the basis of all that is said, and necessary to it. But also such may be the status of the assertion that some accompaniment of time, place, circumstance, or condition may be its necessary preliminary; in which case the initial stress is claimed by the adverbial element. The exceptional placing of the predicate first gives a somewhat violent emphasis, the emphasis of abruptness, to that element. To the end belongs the stress due to the culmination and goal of the assertion, what the sentence most truly exists to express. Being therefore the most important stress-point of all, it suffers correspondingly if its distinction is not a matter of foresight, or if it is given over to something insignificant. This culmination point is the natural place for the predicate, in the large sense, because ordinarily it is to predicate or assert something that the sentence exists. If, however, as is sometimes the case, the subject is put at this point, it is because the subject is the new element, the predicate being perhaps a repeat or already well in mind. In the same way, ing columns are placed front and rear, and the baggage in the centre, so the emphatic parts of a sentence should be found either in the beginning or in the end, subordinate and matter-of-course expressions in the middle.” — BAIN, English Composition and Rhetoric, p. 135. if a modifying element dition of time, place, circumstance, or con is sent to the end, it is because this is the real goal of interest, and claims therefore the chief stress. The question how to give special distinction to some particular word resolves itself, for the most part, into the question how to make it occupy one of these positions, the beginning or the end. And the question which of these it shall occupy is answered by determining whether it is more truly an initial idea, from which some consequence or predication flows, or a goal idea, toward which the course of the sentence is to be steered. Grammatical constructions shape themselves to these considerations, which the writer must decide for himself. EXAMPLES. The various grammatical means of manipulating sentence order have been so fully set forth under Collocation (p. 240), Prospective Reference (p. 254), Inversion (p. 276), and Suspension (p. 279), that further examples of these processes are superfluous here. A few examples of faulty and improved arrangement placed side by side will serve to bring out the significance of these points of outset and culmination. I. THE POINT OF OUTSET. "The State was made, under the pretense of serving it, in reality, the prize of their contention, to each of those opposite parties, who professed in specious terms, the one a preference for modern Aristocracy, the other a desire of admitting people at large to an equality of civil privileges." | prize of their contention." "Each of those opposite parties, professing in specious terms, the one a preference for modern Aristocracy, the other a desire of admitting people at large to an equality of civil privileges, made the State, under the pretense of serving it, in reality the This amendment gives the point of outset to the parties, which term before was buried in the sentence; it gives at the same time the point of culmination to "contention," which is the evident goal of the sentence. "No great painters trouble them- "About perspective no great paintselves about perspective, and very ers trouble themselves, and very few few of them know its loss; they try of them know its loss; they try everything by the eye, and naturally everything by the eye, and naturally enough disdain in the easy parts of enough disdain in the easy parts of their work rules which cannot help their work rules which cannot help them in difficult cases." them in difficult cases." # 2 |