Punctuation, etc..

[Handley_Page]

There have been several threads over the past couple of years about the Comma, or the "Style". Well, it seems that the Washington Post is throwing a big one in to the potential mix.
See HERE.

Given that one of the points made was that the reader can get a flavour of the location /origin of the character, this seems to make some sense. I wonder what the Unicode is for a 'punctus' ? (BTW, my on-line Concise Oxford calls it a 'Punctum'):-

punctum /noun (plural puncta /-tə/) technical
a small, distinct point.
– origin C16: from Latin, literally ‘a point’.

Microsoft Word (v2003) has a "middle dot" Hex 0087, but I'm not sure if that's IT, so to speak.

 

[sr71plt]

That would certainly make reading easy, wouldn't it? (Not)

 

[Handley_Page]

That would certainly make reading easy, wouldn't it? (Not)

I think it would take a little getting used to, but not impossible.
I think it worth reading the WP piece (it's not too long and it IS understandable and interesting).

 

[sr71plt]

I think it would take a little getting used to, but not impossible.

Just because it wouldn't be impossible doesn't make it attractive. What they gave wasn't in sentence chunks and it just would scroll down forever. Certainly tiring for fiction. Sort of silly.

I did look at the piece, looking for application to fiction (that seems to be a problem here--realizing that fiction, nonfiction, newspapers, and poetry are different animals), and I didn't find anything that would be attractive to fiction use.

 

[Handley_Page]

Just because it wouldn't be impossible doesn't make it attractive. What they gave wasn't in sentence chunks and it just would scroll down forever. Certainly tiring for fiction. Sort of silly.

I did look at the piece, looking for application to fiction (that seems to be a problem here--realizing that fiction, nonfiction, newspapers, and poetry are different animals), and I didn't find anything that would be attractive to fiction use.

I was thinking in terms of a character speaking.

 

[Serafina1210]

Microsoft Word (v2003) has a "middle dot" Hex 0087, but I'm not sure if that's IT, so to speak.

That's it, I think. Unicode 00B7, "Middle dot." It's what medievalists use to represent the punctus. I should add that medieval punctuation was a lot more systematic than the author of the article seems to think. Much more formal in Latin manuscripts than in vernacular ones, though. It was a different system, with somewhat different aims in view.