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| Punctuation, punctuation, punctuation
by Anne Caborn |
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A light touch with punctuation has
always made sense, whether you're scratching out a sonnet on
velum with a quill pen, or texting a mate on your mobile. It's
meant to enhance communication, not hinder it.
But light doesn't mean non-existent, or simplistic. There are
a whole range of dots and squiggles that are worth investigating
if you want to enhance the meaning and narrative flow of your
text.
The English poet Samuel Coleridge had a deft way with the old
semi colon, much maligned these days and often overlooked in
favour of its brasher cousin, the full colon.
Coleridge wasn't just good at the rhyming stuff but could string
a sentence together like nobody's business. Sometimes his sentences
were so long that people were born, grew up, got married, had
children and died before you got to the end of one.
But they were good sentences, because he did a good job with
the punctuation and his special favourite, the semi colon. Punctuation
allows a sentence to breathe. It gives it lightness and life
and allows you to get to the end with the sense intact.
Semi colons are a great way of stringing together a sequence
of thoughts and observations linked to the same starting point;
like carriages on the 9.27am out of Glasgow, they whistle along
at a fair old lick and all leading the reader to their destination.
The full colon, by comparison, is more emphatic. It allows you
to pause but still take the preceding part of the sentence with
you. For example, you can use a full colon to introduce a list.
But punctuation was designed for a different time and space.
Modern media, be it web, email or text, has a different rhyme
and rhythm to it. Punctuation has to acknowledge that people
see rather than read text on the web.
People do read on the web, but generally they read less. Instead
they scan and flick their eyes about, searching for what they
want and using links to dodge between pages. They read "nuggets"
of text. Only seriously pausing when they've struck information
gold. Good punctuation can explore the visual dimension of web
text to good effect.
Initially, a lot of web sites threw the baby out with the bath
water. You were lucky if you saw full stops in the right place,
never mind the judicious use of the odd comma. People became
obsessed with bullet points, with a few full stops and the odd
full colon flung in for good measure.
To wit:
• A bit of this.
• A bit of that.
• A dash of the other.
There are two things wrong with the end of the last paragraph.
In punctuation terms it's a mess and, more importantly, it's
difficult to read. All those full stops and capital letters
just get in the way.
Try this:
• it's clearer
• it's less aggressive
• and it's easier to read.
Full stops end sentences. After a full stop you can get stuck
in with a capital letter. After a full colon you don't need
a capital letter unless you are using a proper noun, such as
Glasgow or Henry.
While on the subject of CAPITAL LETTERS, there is a tendency
to overuse these on the web. Don't. Like bullet points they
tend to slow down the narrative flow and navigation of the text.
They are also harder to read, which is why good printed material
for the partially sighted tends to avoid them. (Those rightly
considering the implications of disability legislation and the
use of web sites by partially sighted and registered blind visitors
should take note.)
Write a word in lower case and you can read it more easily because
you take in the whole word — like a silhouette — and
recognise it. Use capital letters and you have to rely on the
slower fundamentals involved in reading — recognising each
character and syllable and building the word's meaning from
them.
If you text a message using a mobile phone, writing something
out in capital letters is interpreted by SMS cognoscenti as
shouting and creates a similar visual impression on the web
(where this protocol actually started out as chat room "netiquette").
You may be striving for clarity and impact but what you're giving
is colder and more aggressive.
The Usability Company, which uses human machine interface (HMI)
disciplines to enhance online user experience, recently published
a report with eyetracker.co.uk, the UK's first commercial eye
tracking service. It analysed where people look on a page when
they visit a web site and studied eye movements using three
newspaper sites: The Times, The Guardian and The Financial Times.
People very quickly learned where adverts were likely to appear
and ignored that part of the page. They were more likely to
fix on a line of text than a block, no surprise there.
Because a line of text is more readable than a block, the simple
solution might seem to be lots of bullet points. But you use
up a lot of space dividing copy into bullet points.
Now look at those bullet points in that earlier paragraph again.
To the scanning eye they look a bit like full stops hovering
a little above the line and starting a piece of text rather
than ending it. The eye hovers on them as a way of navigating
text but if you use too many of them you slow the whole "flick
and search" process down and trivialise their impact.
Because of the visual nature of the web people can dismiss the
copy element before they have read what's in front of them,
simply because of the way the copy is "constructed", or the
way it looks on the page. They very quickly learn to ignore
things.
We would also point to the importance of clear — rather
than clever — headings that impart information and "plain"
text, where you don't have to peel away a layer of artifice
(and waste time) to get at the meaning.
That doesn't mean that you can't spend time creating good, well
written copy. Humour and character never go amiss. Just don't
try too hard. A carefully crafted, well punctuated, but short,
paragraph, no more than three lines, will flow well and make
sense.
Flowing text is also warmer. The web is a cold medium, you have
to heat it up a bit if you want to interact and establish rapport
with your readers. Bullet points should be used sparingly.
If you know what the punctuation rules are, the other thing
you can do is break them. This is particularly true where online
text may have to work with a graphic element on a site.
CDA recently completed a major overhaul of copy on the Pampers'
web site. The designers had already started creating graphic
headings incorporating punctuation, most particularly the exclamation
mark and the ellipsis, three evenly spaced periods (stops).
The rule with punctuation is that it abuts the preceding word
and is then followed by a space, or a double space. The graphics
for the new Pampers site left a space after the word and before
the punctuation. It was grammatically wrong, but it looked okay.
We adopted the additional space as a protocol for all graphics
incorporating a heading and ensured it was always used. Nothing
looks sloppier than employing a different set of punctuation
protocols on every page. If you're going to break rules then
break them consistently.
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