Learning rules of grammar and punctuation do not provide an infallible capacity to understand what the composer of a text meant when they wrote it. (This is so for those who study texts which originally had no punctuation at all) These guides and markers can provide help and insight, but not absolute mastery. Also, knowing …
In its early usage the semicolon served as a pause twice as long as a comma, and half as long as a colon. Eventually an adjustment in usage became identified by grammarians. In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson explains: The semicolon had been transformed. Before the 1800s, it had been a pause. By the early 1800s, grammarians …
Apart from the utilitarian conformity for printers of having common symbols and forms of expression for their productions, grammar became in the eighteenth and nineteenth century a science, a common shared body of knowledge. It also became a science in terms of individuals who sought to popularise systems of their own devising, the use of …
Cecelia Watson, in her book Semicolon, references some innovations in punctuation that did not catch on. An example is the punctus percontativus, or rhetorical question mark. Using the symbol of a reversed question mark, it indicated that the question it preceded was rhetorical in intent. In a piece of writing that I enjoyed, Watson descriptively …
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