In the beginning...

According to the New World Encyclopaedia [1] and Wikipedia[2] the oldest use of punctuation was in a document called "Mesha Stele." or "Moabit stone."

It was written circa 850 BCE by King Mesha of Moab (now part of Jordan) and is notable for

employing points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section as punctuation.

It was discovered in 1868 and is on display at the Louvre Museum.

It is also the oldest known reference to the Hebrew god Yahweh.

Movable type and printing in the 14th and 15th centuries saw the beginnings of punctuation as we know it today.

The introduction of a standard system of punctuation is attributed to Aldo Manuzio.

 He is credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop and also for inventing Italic type.

Punctuation in other European languages is the same as English with a few exceptions.

 In France for instance instead of inverted commas for quotation marks they use << and >>.

Greeks use the semicolon ( ;) as a question mark and in Spain they put an upside down question mark at the beginning of a question and a normal question mark at the end.
So it would look like this:

¿Is your name Bernie? – except  it would be in Spanish of course.

Hebrew punctuation is as complicated as ours and more difficult to write. They in fact have their own keyboard with their own letters and punctuation.

Sometimes it has Arabic letters and symbols as well due to the high percentage of Arab speakers in Israel.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean didn’t originally have punctuation as their language(s) are made up of symbols rather than letters.

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Punctuation Puzzle

I remember my Father testing me on this one.

Insert the comma(s) in the correct place.

The teacher said that that that that that boy used should have been which.

Where do the commas go?



[1]New World Encyclopedia. 22 Oct 2008, 15:24 UTC. 7 Oct 2011, 02:51 <http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mesha_Stele?oldid=836298>




[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#History

Parentheses ( Brackets)

Parentheses are also known as brackets. They come in different styles and for different reasons.
They can be half round ( ) or square [ ] or curly { } 


The intention of the bracket is to include additional information in the writing, but the piece of writing should stand alone and be correct and complete without the added information.
For example. I went to an exhibition (by Henry Maas) on Sunday at the Collingwood Gallery.


The above sentence was written by me. If the editor of this blog had added the parentheses he (or she) would have used square brackets indicating it was inserted by someone other than the writer. 
So it would be:
I went to an exhibition [by Henry Maas] on Sunday at the Collingwood Gallery.


They can be used together (if you want to include an aside [or even some detail like a date] or  superfluous information) if required.


They can definitely be overused. Here is an example:


According to the executive, "[The infinitite number of monkeys] are [creating an infinite number of blogs] each of which contain an infinite number of blogs, each of which contains [a randomly created] review, so that [the Google search engine] is fooled into thinking that it continually ['sees'] new blogs that reference [a given feature film] ." This way, those who have activated 'Google Alerts' for a specific film are sent multiple results multiple times each day, all of which lead to the same [illegal] download site. [1]






The multitude of brackets is distracting from the meaning of the text.


 Rewritten without the brackets it looks like this:


According to the executive, are each of which contains review, so that is  fooled into thinking that it continually new blogs that reference. This way those who have activated Google Alerts for a specific film are sent multiple results multiple times each day, all of which lead to the same download site.


The writers error here is that deleting what is within the brackets renderers the paragraph useless. At the same time, it at least is more attractive to the eye.


Curly brackets { } are not often used, but are sometimes used to denote a series of equal choices.
For example. Select your animal {Goat, Sheep, cow, pig}...


Curly brackets are most often used in mathematics. For example:


 
Please don't ask me what it means.                    [2]


There are other brackets. In computing <  and  > are common.

So to summarise:


Don't overuse brackets. They make a sentence look messy and they can be unattractive.


When you write a sentence that includes brackets, make sure it stands alone without the brackets.


Use round brackets ( ) to add extra information.


Use square brackets [ ] to add extra information from an outside source.


Use curly brackets { } to indicate equal choice.




1. Isn't Life Terrible: Infinite Number of Monkeys at Typewriter Finally Give up on Hamlet: Now Working on Reviews Of Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" 4 Febuary 2009, viewed 5 October 2011http://030726d.netsolhost.com/WordPress/?tag=overuse-of-brackets>


2. Bracket: Wikipedia the free Encyclopaedia, viewed 5 October 2011 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket>