Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSE OF PUNCTUATION?GROUPING We endeavored to show in Chapter I that the fundamental purpose of punctuation is to group by means of marks words whose relations in the absence of marks would be either easily mistaken or not quickly apprehended. When to use a mark, and what mark to use, are determined by reason or by convention. Some of the conventions that determine a punctuation familiar to most people, together with some of the problems that confront us in our study, are exhibited in the punctuation of the following sentence: 5A. Mr. Smith came to the city in 1872, and located at 1872 Wabash Avenue. He brought with him 1,872 horses, valued at $187,200.00. How does punctuation enable the reader to obtain the meaning at one point in the above sentence, and so to group the language (figures) at another point that he can apprehend the meaning at a glance? Because of well-nigh universal usage, the above date and street numbers are read eighteen hundred seventy- two; but the same number in the next sentence is read one thousand eight hundred seventy-two. As we all know, in arithmetical notation three figures form a group, the groups so formed being named units, thousands, millions, etc. It is therefore evident that, in reading a number containing two or more such groups, the eye will be aided if the groups are indicated by some mark. (We here use the comma and the period for this purpose.) Although the left-hand group of a number may not be full, a figure in that group takes the name of the group, and so we mark it off. Thus we use commas in two of the numbers in our example, one of which (1,872) has only one figure in the second (thousand) group. This we call punctuation by reason, for we thus point off natural groups. We do not use ...
Synopsis
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