GST 111: OUTLINING

PRACTICE
Read these passages and
prepare an outline of each.
 A history of punctuation in English-Ashley Timms
• Have you ever stopped and wondered why we mark our
texts with symbols such as commas, question marks,
and the like? Of course, we all seem to recognise and
understand punctuation with ease. Unlike a word we’ve
never seen, your listeners would be none the wiser if
you came across a new and unrecognisable piece of
punctuation while reading aloud. But, why is it that we
have both a colon and a semicolon? Whether or not you
know of their purpose, you’re able to determine and
adjust your speech and reading comprehension when
you see one.
You can also recognise when some punctuation just
isn’t right. Perhaps your appreciation for punctuation is
all but non-existent or maybe you secretly love the
Oxford comma. Regardless, punctuation in English has
a rich and surprising history from the full stop to the
semicolon and even quotation marks.
 General history

Keith Houston of the BBC has a rather intricate and detailed

timeline for this history of punctuation (which this article will
follow). As he notes, the earliest prominent use of any
punctuation was in the 3rd century BC. Aristophanes had offered a
solution to the completely run-on writing style of the Greeks,
which featured spaces between letters, words, clauses, or
sentences. Aristophanes proposed that writers use three types of
dots to allocate the appropriate pause between formal parts of
speech. A dot located in the bottom denoted a short pause like a
comma, the middle was for an intermediate pause like a colon,
and the bottom was for a pause much like a full stop.
With this, a reader would know when to pause and for
how long to produce cohesive and understandable
speech. Alas, the Aristophanean method was eventually
scrapped when the Roman empire gained precedence
over the Greeks from their politics to their writing. The
Romans, according to a man namely Cicero, believed
the speaker should exert discretion over his or her
rhythm of speech and not be bound by dots or
punctuation.
In the 7th century, Isidore of Seville resurrected the dots originally
proposed by Aristophanes. His most famous work, ‘The Etymologies’
(or Etymologiae in Latin), covered a diverse range of topics including
geometry, music, cities, animals, and, of course, grammar. It was in this
writing that he presented an updated version of the Aristophanean
system. He went beyond the simple method of dots denoting pauses and
attached more significant meaning to each dot: the highest dot marked
the end of a sentence while the lowest dot functioned much like a
comma does today. The work of Isidore of Seville was widely respected
and he was even cited by Dante Alighieri and quoted by Geoffrey
Chaucer. Etymologiae was treated as a textbook through the Middle
Ages and no doubt had a profound effect on how writers used grammar
and punctuation.
Just like learners of new languages, users of punctuation
have since elaborated on the dot system Aristophanes
first invented in order to produce even more useful and
distinguishing meanings today. According to Keith
Houston, music was a major influence for punctuation
because musical notation used symbols like the breve
and caesura to indicate notes and rests—a necessary
component of written language to determine pauses.
One example, which comes from Gregorian chants, is
the punctus elevatas which serves as our modern-day colon.
With each symbol offering more precise meaning than the
last, the originally proposed by Aristophanes eventually faded
into history as their usage diminshed. However, the use of a
single dot held its ground and retained a meaning of pause
(albeit for an unspecified amount of time). (Interestingly,
modern spoken transcriptions in linguistics are often
annotated with a period to indicate pauses shorter than a
second.) As Isidore of Seville released his nuances, an Italian
by the name of Boncampagno da Sigla proposed a similar
punctuation system but chose the slash (/) to indicate a pause.
 Evolution of symbols / punctuation?

The question mark (?) made its way into standard usage
in the 15th century and was known as the punctus
interrogatives (‘point of interrogation’ in Latin). There
are some theories on how the shape of the question mark
came about; Oxford Dictionaries offers the theory that it
began as a dot with a rising tilde (. ~) to denote the
upward inflection. Just like many of our letters and
words, this theory states that the symbol transformed
into the shape it is today due to the vast amount of users
approximating its shape in writing.
• Another theory from Oxford Dictionaries states that the
lowercase “q” and “o” from the Latin qvaestio (‘question’)
were combined and eventually transformed into the swirl and
dot that we know of today.
• Both the colon (:) and semicolon (;) were featured in
Gregorian chants with the former as the punctus
elevatas (‘elevated point’ in Latin) and the latter as
the punctus versus (Latin for a “long pause”). The first usage
of the colon dates back to the 1600s to denote a pause time
greater than a comma but less than a full stop. The semicolon
has a much earlier history with its first written use in 1494
As noted by Lynn Truss in her 2004 book ‘Eats, Shoots,
and Leaves’, a printer by the name of Aldus Manutius
the Elder used the semicolon to separate words. Its
purpose was to allow the writer to produce new ideas
and topics between phrases without producing a new
sentence. Originally, the colon was simply an upside
down semicolon but the single open inverted comma-
like top eroded down to a single point.Punctus
elevatus (Source: Harvard University)
The apostrophe (’), widely used starting in the 16 th century,
came into use in English for purposes of elision (or
contractions such as I’m for I am) and to fill in where a
grapheme or letter no longer reflected the actual pronunciation
(e.g. loved became lov’d). One theory for the exclamation mark
(!) posits that the symbol comes from the Latin word for an
exclamation of joy, io. The letter “i” was eventually moved
above the “o,” the dot and line of “i” connected, and the “o”
shrunk to the size of a period today. It was first used in English
in the 15th century but, interestingly, only had its own dedicated
key on a typewriter from the 1970s.
The apostrophe was first used this way by Geoffrey Tory
in French in 1529. It was used at the junction of two
vowel sounds (e.g. la heure became l’heure). Taking this
feature from the French language, English speakers used
this feature so they could contract words and leave out
unpronounced letters without losing any meaning
It could be surmised that the printing press, an industry that charged
per letter, encouraged writers to use the apostrophe to save money. A
standardised way of using the apostrophe wasn’t finalised until the
mid-1800s, and which is still in use today.
The slash (/) introduced by Boncampagno di Sigla was minimised over
the years and eventually settled low on the text line as our modern day
comma (,). Brackets; including parentheses, square brackets, pointy
brackets, corner brackets, and angle brackets; made their first entry
into English in the 14th century in the form of chevrons (< >).
.
And, finally, the single dot originally proposed by
Aristophanes has become the full stop (.), or period. It
also holds the title of the most common punctuation
mark in English as it is used to end a sentence The
invention of the printing press in the 1440s helped to
solidify and determine the importance of punctuation
through the large-scale production of texts read by
many people. With a handful of symbols in use, printing
offered a standardised system that was all but set in
stone.
.So much so that the average Joe from the late 1400s
could probably understand the punctuation symbols on
our QWERTY keyboard with relative ease (save for
connecting it to your computer via Bluetooth).
 Modern usage?

It took a long time for punctuation in English to take on

any changes because new punctuation needs had yet to
be discovered or required and mass printing allowed us
to be socialised into the written norms of English.
However, with new speech patterns and cultural changes
(like the computer-age), the invention of new
punctuation is not entirely out of the realm of possibility .
• Most notably, the interrobang (‽ or ?! or !?) has been a
popular addition to English. Combining the meaning of
both a question mark and an exclamation mark, the
interrobang can be used to ask a rhetorical question or
to simply ask a question with excitement. Interestingly,
the concept came about in 1962 and was conceptualised
by Martin K. Speckter, the head of an advertising
agency. For him, the interrobang would allow
copywriters to add rhetorical meaning to their copy for
the reader.
Despite being featured on some models of Remington
typewriters; it exists today in just a handful of fonts
available in Microsoft Office.
More recently, online writers have used a variety of
symbols typically associated with computer coding to
convey meaning. For example, if a writer wants to add
emphasis but is unable to change the style (such
as bold, underline, or italics), they may choose to use
tildes around a word in order to create emphasis.
• When used in a computer programme, the use of
symbols can change the style of text once the text
is sent (for example, surrounding a word in
underscores italicises text in the popular
messaging app, WhatsApp).