Punctuation
I find America’s obsessive approach to punctuation out of sorts, and something that would on the surface more be suited as a British trait than one of America.
I would have thought that some of the Brits’ characteristics/stereotypes would contribute towards us being a nation obsessed with grammar. For instance, we’re somewhat set in our ways, and I think we may have a reputation for our pedantry. Given that punctuation in the UK never used to be considered "optional", I’d have thought that this would have continued through to modern times.
Walk down any high street, and you will notice this not to be the case. You will see misplaced apostrophes, entirely redundant apostrophes and missing apostrophes (can you see a missing apostrophe?) on temporary sale signs, and to a lesser but far more heinous extent, the wonderfully laminated signs above the shop window.
Meanwhile, our friends in the U.S.A. seem to be obsessive about punctuation. The one for which they have a particular penchant is using the full-stop (or period) for all abbreviations – as highlighted by my punctuation of U.S.A. above. This is not considered optional – ever. In the UK, we’ve relaxed this rule, mainly where acronyms are so commonplace as to be understood without the full-stops – RSPCA, BBC, UK, USA, am, pm, GMT etc.
I like to think of punctuation holding the hand of the reader to get them to the end of the sentence safely. Over-punctuation will make them stumble along the way. (Excessive use of the comma is a particularly nasty example of this. This is why I always try to avoid the Oxford comma, unless I’m separating items that are already "anded" together.) Under-punctuation will get the reader to the end of the sentence, but they won’t know how they got there, and they’ll be dishevelled as a result. (Did the ball belong to Peter or Jane? How many balls are there?)
I will always remember my Dad returning from work one day, seething at a younger colleague who had pointed out that a certain punctuation mark was no longer necessary. I forget which punctuation mark it was, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t one of those "nice-to-haves". (I hate it when people write this as "nice-to-have’s", btw.) Similarly, I remember my friend Mr. Mitchison hypothesising back in 1998 that the apostrophe "will be obsolete within ten years". Not on my ‘blog it won’t, as this sentence goes to show!
While education in the UK is such that people will continue to have their shops’ signs laminated wrongly (if they didn’t, what would I have to talk about?), I think that our approach to removing the abbreviation full-stops from acronyms is the right way to go, as the reader feels better at the end of the sentence, and they haven’t lost anything along the way. Hats off though to the Americans, whose die-hard attitude towards those keys at the extremities of our keyboards will help keep the apostrophe and its compadres alive.
On this subject, a nice little story from Joel Spolsky on the often mutual exclusivity of software development and user experience. All for the sake of a pixel.
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