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Pointing the Way

By Roy Peter Clark

Sometimes when I read, the words will begin to glow on the page, like a scene from Harry Potter, always a signal to me that I should begin to read more carefully. This second, closer reading will often reveal some clever or useful effect, the result of the strategic application of a writing or language tool. The writer's strategy may not be intentional. But for me, as reader and writer, intent makes little difference. It is effect that counts. If I am laughing or crying or outraged or curious to learn more, I seek to discover what button the writer pushed, and whether I can get that button for my dashboard.

So it was when I read this single paragraph from an elegant book on creativity titled "Notebooks of the Mind," written by Vera John-Steiner:

I don't own a pair of X-ray glasses that helps me look through the text and see the machinery working below. More often, coming to understand a glowing passage requires a bit of decoding, a close reading of the text to find how and where it creates meaning.

The first thing I see in John-Steiner's paragraph is movement, best exemplified by the way it begins with a statement about children but concludes with wisdom from an old man. In that statement by John Gielgud there is a specific bit of evidence that justifies the early assertion that adults are less daring than children. I also admire the liveliness with which the author handles what could be deadly dull abstraction, the conglomeration of words like development, power, individuality, process, talent, opportunity, humility, self-confidence.

In the end, I learn that, however skillfully rendered, none of these made the passage glow. What made it glow for me was the punctuation.

When I took a close look at the punctuation, I marveled at its unobtrusive richness and variety. Without calling attention to itself, the punctuation helped organize and drive the meaning of the text. When you admire a cathedral, it's easy enough to see the rose windows, soaring steeples and flying buttresses. But it is often the little things -- a carving near a choir seat -- that reveal the true genius and attention to detail.

So let's begin with the commas:

• The two commas in that first sentence both divide and connect that verbal triptych "to know, to wonder, to invent." The most useful distinction I ever learned about commas involves their capacity to separate but also to enclose, and you can see both functions here, the separation of those infinitives, and the elegant enclosure of that central verb, "to wonder."

• Before we leave that first sentence, we should countenance that clever old winker, the semicolon. I would be inclined to make those two independent clauses complete sentences. But with her semicolon, John-Steiner signals us that the two clauses are equal and in some creative tension: the timidity of adults stands in contrast to the curiosity of children.

• John-Steiner's paragraph comprises five sentences, and four of them conclude a thought with a period, what our British brothers and sisters refer to, usefully, as an "end stop." I admire the author's positioning of a key word or phrase near the stopping point, as in "less daring." But it is the question mark that interests me. In Spanish, a question is enclosed in question marks, one upside down at the beginning, and the familiar one at the end. It makes great sense, even if, to English eyes, it clutters the page. ¿Why not know before you begin reading a sentence that it works in the interrogative mode?

• That brings us to the dash, the most slovenly of all punctuation marks, used so promiscuously by some writers, especially journalists, that my friend Don Fry set out on a holy war to kill it. Used properly, the dash carries two functions, one of which is to set apart something at the end of a sentence for emphasis like this. Behold the power of the single dash one more time! The double dash is designed to set off a long explanatory phrase embedded within an otherwise complete sentence. Here the author uses it perfectly to define what she means by "individuality of voice."

• We'll conclude this analysis with two punctuation marks, often used in concert, the colon and quotation marks. A lot of my understanding of language is aural as well as visual, so I often think of the colon as a trumpet flourish, the kind Shakespeare used to announce the arrival of an important character, usually the king. To me the colon says: "Ta da!" though, in most cases, less theatrically. One of the most important effects of quotation marks is to capture and enclose the human voice in text, creating the illusion of speech off the page. So in this case the colon announces the punch line of the paragraph, the self-effacing quotation of the great man.

Sometimes looking behind the scenes can spoil the magic, as when a female impersonator flips off the wig and wipes off the lipstick, but in this case I'd argue it has the opposite effect. The work of this skillful author proves why the conventions of punctuation exist: to guide us through an argument, to lead us to meaning, to point the way.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on August 21, 2008 (boomark / email).