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Dr Klaus Bung
68 Brantfell Road
Blackburn BB1-8DL

© 2012 Klaus Bung

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Klaus Bung:
Using punctuation to avoid ambiguities

Some half-educated native speakers of English have argued that punctation (e.g. use of commas) does not matter, or that there are no reliable rules for English punctuation.Neither of these assertions is true. Punctuation does matter, there are reliable rules of correct and incorrect punctuation, but these can be overridden in specific cases (so specific that they cannot be covered by purely formal rules), when commas are used specifically to avoid ambiguities or to control intonation (spoken presentation). This essay investigates one such case in detail..

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2012-03-18 Klaus Bung: Using punctuation to avoid ambiguities

Discussion | Oddities |

This essay is for advanced students of English only.

I have come across an interesting example of the need to offend against normal comma rules in order to avoid misunderstandings.

Example (1): But you as learners must adjust to the expectations of your target culture (in this case British). The British have a right to expect that, when you are learning their language, you also adjust to their manners. It is in your interest to do so.

(1) follows normal comma rules. Commas surround
(when you are learning their language)
like parentheses (brackets).

This ensures that you can read and interpret the surrounding text correctly.

Example (2): The British have a right to expect that ... you also adjust to their manners.

It brings the "that you adjust" together. "that" goes with "adjust". "that" does not go with "expect".

However many people will misread (1). They will treat the first comma as if it were a full-stop (which in many other situations is the intended thing to do). They will read it as if "that" belonged to "expect", and go down with their voice on "that" (British intonation). So they will misread (1) as if it were (3).

Example (3): But you as learners must adjust to the expectations of your target culture (in this case British). The British have a right to expect that. When you are learning their language, you also adjust to their manners. It is in your interest to do so.

(3) delivers an entirely wrong message; for example (4), which is part of (3), is not true.

Example (4): When you are learning their language, you also adjust to their manners.

When you are learning a language, you do not automatically adjust to their manners. Some people do, other people don't. What (1) intends to say is that people can EXPECT THAT YOU ADJUST, i.e. that you OUGHT to adjust.

There is no way in which conventional comma rules can make that clear. You need an additional comma to indicate that EXPECT and the adjacent THAT do not belong together.

That results in (5), which has a comma between "expect" and "that" and thereby separates them.

Example (5): But you as learners must adjust to the expectations of your target culture (in this case British). The British have a right to expect, that, when you are learning their language, you also adjust to their manners. It is in your interest to do so.

The commas also serve to keep your voice high, so that the listener knows that there is more to come. Good English prose must be written in such a way that not only is it possible to understand the written text but that it is also easy to read it aloud with the right pausing and intonation.

Conclusion

This is just one of many examples to show that, contrary to what some half-educated native speakers have asserted, correct use of commas is important, that there is a difference between right use of commas and wrong use of commas, and that it can be difficult and require a lot of thinking, even for native speakers.

There is one other solution for such problems. You can avoid the problem, but breaking up your complex sentence and replacing it several shorter sentences, each of which is simpler and unambiguous in itself. If you do this, you obtain something like (6).

Example (6): But you as learners must adjust to the expectations of your target culture (in this case British). When you are learning British English, then British people have a right to expect that you also adjust to their manners. It is in your interest to do so.

Discussion

A reader wrote:

Is it grammatically correct to re-write (5) as (5a) or (5b)?

(5a) But you as learners must adjust to the expectations of your target culture (in this case British). The British have a right to expect that (when you are learning their language) you also adjust to their manners. It is in your interest to do so.

(5b) But you as learners must adjust to the expectations of your target culture (in this case British). The British have a right to expect that you adjust to their manners. It is in your interest to do so.

Reply

Terminology:
(...) parentheses, round brackets
[...] brackets, square brackets
{...} braces, curly brackets
but I sometimes say "brackets" for any of these because "parentheses" is an awfully long and difficult word. LOL

(5a) and (5b) are grammatically correct.

(...) are, in a way, clearer than pairs of commas because with (...) it is easier to discover when one member of the pair (of commas) is accidentally (mistakenly) missing; also because in (...) it is always clear which is the opening bracket, ( , and which is the closing bracket , ).

Often you can be IN DOUBT whether to use commas or (...) because either would be correct, and you just have to decide which is the BETTER solution, not which is the RIGHT solution.

(...) are a bit heavier than a pair of commas, you might call it heavy-handed if used too much. heavy-handed = clumsy, not elegant.

If I had to read a sentence of this kind aloud, I would slightly raise my voice and slightly hesitate before the first bracket or the first comma, to indicate that a new phrase is starting here.

In the case of a bracket, I would be prompted to make the hesitation longer than in the case of a comma. That COULD make it sound clumsy if wrongly done. That's why I often prefer pairs of commas.

If you look at the many examples from English literature contained in my other essays, you will find many very long sentences, containing many commas all serving different functions and interacting with each other in different ways.

The authors rightly assumed that their readers could cope with such complex sentences, and educated readers still can to do today; readers of, say, THE TIMES, as it used to be, the most conservative and traditional English newspaper, which made no concessions to popular tastes and abilities.

By contrast, the DAILY MIRROR, a very popular newspaper, uses short sentences, short paragraphs, short words, and a very limited vocabulary.

When I write, even academic articles, I no longer assume that even academics have the patience to carefully read a long paragraph. But I am determined to be understood. Therefore I make my paragraphs fairly short, even though not as short as the DAILY MIRROR. But if I want to be sure that a sentence is understood and noticed and remembered, I give it a paragraph of its own.

If I do not make things clear and easy, my readers will overlook them, and it does not help me much that I can blame THEM for the misunderstanding, however stupid the readers may in fact be.

When it comes to writing sentences, then writing long and complex sentences (several lines long and with many commas) comes natural to me. That's how I THINK.

But I then look at what I have written and inspect it with the eyes of my readers. Then starts a process of simplification. I consider whether I cannot break the long sentence into two shorter sentences. I may put the subordinate clause (clauses starting with "because", "even though", "whenever", "since", etc) AFTER the main clause, when initially I had it before the main clause. Often that is clearer, or easier to understand.

I will then read the resulting sentence again, aloud, to see if it is simple and clear enough. Usually I then see that further simplifications are possible (simplifications which I could not see before). I continue editing that paragraph and those sentences until they are exactly what my readers need.

You can be sure that I spend at least as long, if not longer, on writing and correcting my own sentences, as does a learner of English who is still struggling with his grammar and has to find things in his dictionary.

This brings me back to the (...).
If the opening comma (first comma) and the closing comma (last comma) of a pair of commas are very *** far apart ***,

and if many other commas are perhaps sitting between the first and last comma,

and if, for some reason, I do not want to break the sentence up (as just described),

then I would replace one pair of commas by (...), and perhaps another pair of commas by {...}, and perhaps a third pair of commas by [...]

Here the various brackets will make the structure clearer than the commas would. Moreover, I would use this technique if I had to explain to learners the structure of the long sentences used by classic English authors, since, in that case, I must not change the sentences. Therefore I would replace the commas by some of the appropriate bracket symbols. Then you always know which opening and which closing bracket belong together.

Please note that above (pink area) I have taken the unusual step of dividing one sentence into three paragraphs, just to make the structure clear and to make the sentence easier to read. Usually a paragraph consists of one or several sentences. But I have, against all the rules of grammar, created a paragraph which contains LESS than one sentence, which contains only part of a sentence. I have broken the rules for the sake of clarity. You can do that. But you are not entitled to break the rules if you have not first mastered them: any great artist will tell you that.

The structure of the pink area is as follows:

• If xxx
• and if xxx
• and if xxx (these are three subordinate clauses preceding the main clause)
• then I would xxx (this is the main clause)

I should also point out here that many e-mails I am getting from foreign friends are absolutely atrocious and very difficult to understand. (But the friends are so lovely, and often so beautiful, that I enjoy them neverless.) They often do not use separate paragraphs. A long message is strung together as if it were one sentence. Sometimes even the full-stops are missing. One does not know where one sentence ends and the next sentence begins.

This may be due to the fact that the message has been typed on a phone instead of on a keyboard.

But if you want your e-mails to be easily understood, it is very important to use separate paragraphs.

About oddities, long sentences, long paragraphs and other literary experiments

I am reading at present the Egyptian novel "Palace Walk" (Bayn al-qasrayn - بين القصرين) by Naguib Mahfouz, in English translation. I also have the French translation and read each chapter first in English and then in French, so that I can brush up my French at the same time. I notice that the chapter divisions in the two versions do not agree. The English version has much shorter (i.e. more) chapters than the French. The French paragraphs are much longer than the English ones. (This may, of course, have happened by mistake since, on one occasion, the French has in one paragraph what would in English have been the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next.) On one occasion, in French, a paragraph starts in the middle of p 154 and ends in the middle of p 155, i.e. the paragraph is two pages long.

German dramatist and short-story writer Heinrich von Kleist wrote a famous story ("Anekdote from the last Prussian War") which starts with a sentence that is 8 lines long. His prose (like that of Roman orator Cicero) is famous for the length and complexity of his sentences.

This is the first sentence in English translation:

"In a village near Jena, on a journey to Frankfurt, the innkeeper told me that several hours after the battle, at a time when the village had already been evacuated by the army of the Prince of Hohenlohe and been surrounded by the French who thought it was still occupied, a single Prussian cavalryman had appeared in the village; and assured me that if all soldiers who had been fighting on that day had been as brave as this one, the French would have had to be beaten even if they had been three times as strong as in fact they were."

Click here for the full story, in German and English,

Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) wrote a whole novel (Auslöschung = Extinction) consisting of only one paragraph (650 pages), no chapter divisions and no paragraph divisions, the whole narration just continuing breathlessly, almost as if it were one sentence. The first sentence is 16 printed lines long.

Here are a few more literary experiments where the standard rules are broken:

French novelist Georges Perec (1936-1982) wrote a novel ("La Disparition" = The Disappearance) in which the letter "e", the most frequent letter in French (and in English), is not used a single time, a very difficult task for a novelist. It is a detective story in which the police (etc) are searching for a missing man whose name is Anton Voyl ("voyelle" is the French word for "vowel", so "Voyl" is "voyelle" without the "e".)

This novel has been translated into English and other languages. The English title is "A void" (= a gap, an emptiness), but the title can also be read as "avoid" because it avoids using the letter "e", the most frequent and most important letter in English.

A later novel by Perec is called "Les revenentes" (the spirits, the ghosts, but literally "les revenantes" mean "the home-comers, those who came back from the other world". The letters "e", which had vanished in the first novel, now come back with a vengeance. It is like an alien invasion. They have multiplied like rabbits in the spirit world and now crowd out all the other vowels in the novel, which uses only the vowel "e", but no "a, i, o, u".