Obeying the punctuation rules
Paul G. Coombs · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2005
THE PURPOSE OF PUNCTUATION The subject of punctuation can raise considerable debate. One camp maintains that it helps the reader in the same way as musical notation helps an instrumentalist to interpret the notes as the composer intended. The other camp maintains that a fussy succession of little marks interrupts the flow of information to the brain, and that punctuation is only needed when there is a possibility of ambiguity. But there is a difference between those who mis-punctuate through ignorance and those who carefully choose when to omit unnecessary marks. When I read reports and proposals, I often sense that writers are scared to use anything more than the minimum of punctuation in case they get it wrong. And then they do get it wrong. The effect is to devalue the points being made because the text is so hard to unravel, as the following example illustrates: The data is integrated in the database and any user interface screen dealing with some data will have to access the database to pre-populate with any data that has already been entered – so we need notification and work scheduling mechanisms so that the (for example the Journalists and Data Analysts can co-ordinate their effort, and that they can be notified when other relevant input occurs such as reporting information on exchange feeds). You can go too far in the other direction, littering your text with so many marks that reading it becomes a series of fits and starts.