Editing Punctuation

Punctuation is "the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading, both silently and aloud, of handwritten and printed texts." Another description is: "The practice, action, or system of inserting points or other small marks into texts, in order to aid interpretation; division of text into sentences, clauses, etc., by means of such marks." 

In written [[Standard written English|English]], punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of [[Sentence (linguistics)|sentence]]s. For example: "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men), and "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women) have very different meanings; as do "eats shoots and leaves" (which means the subject consumes plant growths) and "[[eats, shoots, and leaves]]" (which means the subject eats first, then fires a weapon, and then leaves the scene). The sharp differences in meaning are produced by the simple differences in punctuation within the example pairs, especially the latter.

The rules of punctuation vary with language, [[Location (geography)|location]], [[Register (sociolinguistics)|register]] and [[time]] and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic and are thus the [[author|author's]] (or [[copy editing|editor's]]) choice. [[tachygraphy|Tachygraphic]] language forms, such as those used in [[online chat]] and [[Text messaging|text messages]], may have wildly different rules. For English usage, see the articles on specific punctuation marks.

==History==

The first writing systems were either [[Logogram|logographic]] or [[Syllabary|syllabic]]- for example, [[Written Chinese|Chinese]] and [[Maya script]]- which do not necessarily require punctuation, especially spacing. This is because the entire morpheme or word is typically clustered within a single glyph, so spacing does not help as much to distinguish where one word ends and the other starts.  Disambiguation and emphasis can easily be communicated without punctuation by employing a separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language that uses slightly different phraseology. Even today, formal written modern English differs subtly from spoken English because not all emphasis and disambiguation is possible to convey in print, even with punctuation.

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