“Punctuation is a means, and its end is: helping the reader to hear, to follow.”
–Thomas McCormack, as quoted in Eats, Shoots and Leaves* by Lynne Truss
McCormack says, further, that the purpose of punctuation is “to tango the reader into the pauses, inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey.”
To tango the reader into…! Isn’t that language just gorgeous?!
(By the way, you’ll notice McCormack’s and Truss’s British style of punctuation. If you wonder why there’s a colon where I wouldn’t normally place one, and why there is no “serial comma” used, it’s because of the differences between American and British writing styles. Interestingly, I just learned last weekend at the AWESOME “Copyediting Bootcamp” workshop I attended that, more and more, for copyediting purposes, the preferred style of spelling and punctuation — even among British publishers — is the American style. You learn something new every day!)
