WHY WE PUNCTUATE

OR

REASON VERSUS RULE
IN THE USE OF MARKS

BY

WILLIAM LIVINGSTON KLEIN

“Punctuation seems to be an art based upon rules withoutcongruity, and derived from practice without uniformity.”

Second Edition—Entirely Rewritten

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

THE LANCET PUBLISHING COMPANY

1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY

WILLIAM LIVINGSTON KLEIN

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO MY WIFE

who during the many years the subject of punctuation hasoccupied my attention has ever been ready, with great intelligenceand helpfulness, to discuss with me the intricate andoften dull problems which punctuation presents

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED IN
LOVING APPRECIATION

PREFACE

The first edition of this work was published in 1896,and the treatment of the subject was so highly commendedby many leading men and periodicals of thecountry that the entire edition, though a large one,was soon exhausted. In spite of this favorable commendation,which may have been due to my effort toset forth reasons, instead of rules, for the use ofmarks, I had a keen sense of certain shortcomings inthe work, and have long been unwilling to permit itsreprinting or to undertake its rewriting. At leastone of the reasons—and I hope the principal one—whythe work fell short of my ideal of the bookneeded, was the inevitable failure inherent in themode of treating the subject. As a sentence maycontain the four principal marks (comma, semicolon,colon, and period) and, in addition, one or more ofthe other marks, a writer courts failure if, in treatingthe difficult art of punctuation, he deals with themarks separately, beginning, as all writers, myselfincluded, have hitherto done, with the comma, themost difficult mark to understand, and proceeding,one at a time, with the other marks. Failure followsthis mode of treatment because it disregards the interrelationof marks and the relations between groupsof words to be interpreted by marks.

In this edition, which has been entirely rewritten,I have endeavored to avoid the fault of such mode ofvitreatment, and have dealt, from the outset, withgroups of interrelated marks, exhibiting, for instance,in a single illustrative sentence (No. 6) the fourprincipal marks in their interrelation as affected bythe sense relations of the language of the sentence.I believe that this treatment of the subject of punctuationis the only logical one; and because of the lackof a logical treatment of the subject it is no exaggerationto say that almost utter chaos as regards punctuationwhich is helpful to both reader and writer,exists everywhere, inside and outside of printing-offices.

In the preface of the first edition I said it was aremarkable fact that the subject of punctuation hadbeen very inadequately treated, as evidenced by theexistence at that time of only a single treatise onpunctuation in the English language, and by thetotal absence of any consideration of it in periodicalliterature. This assertion, with slight modification,is true today. An admirable essay by Mr. PhillipsGarrison, sometime editor of The Nation, appeared inthe Atlant