Chapter XV · CLOSE AND OPEN PUNCTUATION

We shall deal with this subject somewhat as we dealt with compound words, endeavoring simply to point out the relative values of the “open” and “close” styles of punctuation.

Almost all writers on punctuation refer to a close open styles of punctuation, but they make no attempt clearly to define or to differentiate these terms. In general, the close style of today is characterized by a free use of marks where they determine the meaning of the language, or assist the reader in determining it easily and quickly; the open style omits most marks not actually needed to determine the meaning of the language. The close style may call for too many marks, and the open style for too few, each causing confusion to the reader.

It is mainly the comma whose use or omission determines the style of punctuation; but the use of a semicolon instead of a comma, may also differentiate the open from the close style. For instance, the need of a mark before “and” in Sentence 1 is so unmistakable that the use of a comma in such sentence cannot be called close punctuation; but the use of a semicolon in that sentence, as suggested in Chapter 7, may properly be called close punctuation. The use of a comma in the sentence (see Sentence 1-1) may be considered open punctuation; its omission would be poor punctuation, but many open punctuators would omit it.

While we must recognize the fact that for some years there has been a tendency among good writers to use fewer marks, we should disregard any such tendency based upon a lack of appreciation of the value of marks or, more specifically, upon ignorance of the fine sense relations of language so easily overlooked when not indicated by marks with meanings.

When two groups of words which, standing alone, take, at least conventionally, a comma, or even a semicolon, stand together in some relation to another group or to a single word, this relation may appear more readily if no mark is used between the two groups. We have already discussed such omission between intermediate groups, which are very numerous in both complex and simple language. The principle is illustrated in our next sentence:

133. The Lord my Shepard is;

I shall be well supplied:

Since He is mine and I am His

What can I want beside?

In the third line of the stanza “and” so manifestly groups the two clauses between which it stands that a comma is not needed to avoid a wrong grouping by the reader; and, as each clause is connected in sense with “since,” the omission of a comma between the clauses more readily ties them as a single group to “since.” Of course, the use of a comma before “and,” which would be good punctuation, would require one at the end of the line.

A good close punctuator omits commas from all such groups of words; and a poor open punctuator does the same, but also improperly omits commas and semicolons in many other places.

One doing serious composition, or studying punctuation, may well punctuate closely as he writes, and afterwards remove all marks whose omission will improve the grouping and not violate good convention. The close punctuator who studiously omits a mark only when he has a reason to do so will rarely fail to use marks helpfully; the open punctuator who omits marks too freely will write much obscure language and much more whose meaning is not readily obtainable by the reader.

With this general principle established, the punctuator can readily determine what marks may be omitted; and, far more important, he can adapt to his own language the style of punctuation he prefers to follow.

The punctuation of our next sentence, taken from an editorial in a recent issue of the New York Times, has interest for both the close and the open punctuator. It contains seven commas, only one of which can safely be omitted, while two more are needed. The comma after “divisions” may be omitted, but its use is good punctuation. One is needed after “music,” in order to show that “and” is followed by the closing word of a series; and one is imperative after “exhibition,” to show that what follows is an explanatory, and not a restrictive, adjective modifier:

134. There are in this issue eight separate sections, including, besides the twelve pages of timely pictures, beautifully executed in roto-gravure and half-tone, and the ample news and editorial divisions, and those devoted to sports, social affairs, music and the stage, a twenty-page section given up entirely to the development of the motor car in view of the yearly automobile exhibition which receives so large a share of public attention.

The punctuator who follows the fundamental principles we have endeavored to set forth, will be neither a close nor an open punctuator: he will be a judicious punctuator.

EXAMPLES

The following selections, copied from the first edition of this book, show the value of good punctuation, which, in this instance, is fairly close punctuation.

The first selection is an extract from Macaulay, picturing Burke’s knowledge of India; the second is from an article by Mr. Rowland E. Robinson, in the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1895. The punctuation of the first is our own; the punctuation of the second is either the author’s or the editor’s.

A careful study of these selections, with a view to comparing at what points the punctuation is open and at what points close, cannot fail to be of interest. For instance, what is the meaning of the language in the first paragraph of the second extract (A New England Woodpile) with a comma after “certainty,” and what would be the meaning without the comma? Wherein does the punctuation of this extract depart from the principles we have been discussing?

BURKE’S INDIA

India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people. The burning sun; the strange vegetation of the palm and the cocoa-tree; the rice-field and the tank; the huge trees, older than the Mogul Empire, under which the village crowds assemble; the thatched roof of the peasant’s hut, and the rich tracery of the mosque, where the imaum prayed with his face to Mecca; the drums, and banners, and gaudy idols; the devotee swinging in the air; the graceful maiden, with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the river-side; the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect; the turbans and the flowing robes; the spears and the silver maces; the elephants with their canopies of state; the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and the close litter of the noble lady—all those things were to him as the objects amidst which his own life had been passed—as the objects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield and St. James’s Street.

The value of punctuation will appear in comparing this passage, as above printed, with the same passage as it appears in a work on composition edited by a university professor:

...the rice-field; the tank; ... the thatched roof of the peasant’s hut; the rich tracery of the mosque where the imaum prays with his face to Mecca; ... the graceful maiden, with the pitcher on her head descending the steps to the riverside; the black faces; the long beards; the yellow streaks of sect; the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces; ...

By such punctuation the tank is taken out of the rice-field; the contrast between hut and mosque is lost; the absence of the comma before “where” makes the imaum pray at a particular mosque; not the maiden, but her head, is descending the steps; beards are separated from faces, and yellow streaks of sect may be on fence posts for aught the reader knows; and turbans and flowing robes, emblems of rank, are put on spear-and mace-bearers.

And by such punctuation the beauty of the picture is entirely lost in a mere catalogue of things seen in India—and this is not literature.

A NEW ENGLAND WOODPILE

When the charitable mantle of the snow has covered the ugliness of the earth, as one looks towards the woodlands he may see a distant dark speck emerge from the blue shadow of the woods and crawl slowly houseward. If born to the customs of this wintry land, he may guess at once what it is; if not, speculation, after a little, gives way to certainty, when the indistinct atom grows into a team of quick-stepping horses or deliberate oxen hauling a sled-load of wood to the farm-house.

It is more than that. It is a part of the woods themselves, with much of their wildness clinging to it, and with records, slight and fragmentary, yet legible, of the lives of trees and birds and beasts and men, coming to our door.

Before the sounds of the creaking sled and the answering creak of the snow are heard, one sees the regular puffs of the team’s breath jetting out and climbing the cold air. The head and shoulders of the muffled driver then appear, as he sticks by narrow foothold to the hinder part of his sled, or trots behind it beating his breast with his numb hands. Prone like a crawling band of scouts, endwise like battering-rams, not upright, with green banners waving, Birnam wood comes to Dunsinane to fight King Frost.

As the woodpile grows at the farm-house door in a huge windrow of sled-length wood or an even wall of cord wood, so in the woods there widens a patch of uninterrupted daylight. Deep shade and barred and netted shadow turn to almost even whiteness, as the axe saps the foundation of summer homes of birds and the winter fastnesses of the squirrels and raccoons. Here are the tracks of sled and team, where they wound among rocks and stumps and over cradle knolls to make up a load; and there are those of the chopper by the stump where he stood to fell the tree, and along the great trough made by its fall. The snow is flecked with chips, dark or pale according to their kind, just as they alighted from their short flight, bark up or down or barkless or edgewise, and with dry twigs and torn scraps of scattered moss.

When the chopper comes to his work in the morning, he finds traces of nightly visitors to his white island that have drifted to its shores out of the gray sea of woods. Here is the print of the hare’s furry foot where he came to nibble the twigs of poplar and birch that yesterday were switching the clouds, but have fallen, manna-like, from skyward to feed him. A fox has skirted its shadowy margin, then ventured to explore it, and in a thawy night a raccoon has waddled across it.

The woodman is apt to kindle a fire more for company than warmth, though he sits by it to eat his cold dinner, casting the crumbs to the chickadees, that come fearlessly about him at all times. Blazing or smouldering by turns, as it is fed or starved, the fire humanizes the woods more than the man does. Now and then it draws to it a visitor, oftenest a fox-hunter who has lost his hound, and stops for a moment to light his pipe at the embers and to ask if his dog has been seen or heard. Then he wades off through the snow, and is presently swallowed out of sight by gray trees and blue shadows. Or the hound comes in search of his master or a lost trail. He halts for an instant, with a wistful look on his sorrowful face, then disappears, nosing his way into the maw of the woods.

If the wood is cut “sled length,” which is a saving of time and also of chips, that will now be made at the door and will serve to boil the tea-kettle in summer, instead of rotting to slow fertilization of the woodlot, the chopper is one of the regular farm hands or a “day man,” and helps load the sled when it comes. If the wood is four foot, he is a professional, chopping by the cord, and not likely to pile his cords too high or long, nor so closely that the squirrels have much more trouble in making their way through them than over them; and the man comes and goes according to his ambition to earn money.

In whichever capacity the chopper plies his axe, he is pretty sure to bring no sentimentalism to his task. He inherits the feeling that was held by the old pioneers toward trees, who looked upon the noblest of them as only giant weeds, encumbering the ground, and best got rid of by the shortest means. To him the tree is a foe worthy of no respect or mercy, and he feels the triumph of a savage conqueror when it comes crashing down and he mounts the prostrate trunk to dismember it; the more year-marks encircling its heart, the greater his victory. To his ears, its many tongues tell nothing, or preach only heresy. Away with the old tree to the flames! To give him his due, he is a skillful executioner, and will compel a tree to fall across any selected stump within its length. If one could forget the tree, it is a pretty sight to watch the easy swing of the axe, and see how unerringly every blow goes to its mark, knocking out chips of a span’s breadth. It does not look difficult nor like work; but could you strike “twice in a place,” or in half a day bring down a tree twice as thick as your body? The wise farmer cuts, for fuel, only the dead and decaying trees in his woodlot, leaving saplings and thrifty old trees to “stand up and grow better,” as the Yankee saying is.

There is a prosperous and hospitable look in a great woodpile at a farmhouse door. Logs with the moss of a hundred years on them, breathing the odors of the woods, have come to warm the inmates and all in-comers. The white smoke of these chimneys is spicy with the smell of seasoned hard wood, and has a savor of roasts and stews that makes one hungry. If you take the back track on a trail of pitchy smoke, it is sure to lead you to a squalid threshold with its starved heap of pine roots and half-decayed wood. Thrown down carelessly beside it is a dull axe, wielded as need requires with spiteful awkwardness by a slatternly woman, or laboriously upheaved and let fall with uncertain stroke by a small boy.