Free Making a Point by David Crystal

(1719–1788), the father of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His mid-century lectures on elocution were delivered to packed halls all over the country. A series could attract well over 1500 people, each paying a guinea to attend – which, translated into modern values, would be around £150,000. He also published his lectures as a course, selling at half-a-guinea a time. Elocution was big business, and people were prepared to pay for it in their desire to acquire a manner of speaking that would be elegant and acceptable in high society. There is, says Sheridan in his opening sentence, ‘a general inability to read, or speak, with propriety and grace in public’. A correct understanding of punctuation, he thinks, is part of the solution.
    He’s in no doubt that punctuation is partly to blame for the malaise. Echoing Ben Jonson in the previous century, in his fifth lecture he points the finger at two familiar characters:
There is no article in reading more difficult than that of observing a due proportion of stops, occasioned by the very erroneous and inaccurate manner, in which they are marked by printers and writers.
    For Sheridan, concerned with effective reading aloud, the punctuation system is hopeless. He observes that it works inefficiently in both directions: there are many occasions when you need to pause in speech but there are no commas in the writing to guide you; and there are many occasions when there are commas in the writing but there should be no pause in speech. The grammarians are to blame, he thinks, because they have developed a model of punctuation that is of little relevance to the public speaker:
The truth is, the modern art of punctuation was not taken from the art of speaking, which was never studied by the moderns, but was in great measure regulated by the rules of grammar.
    And there is a third villain in Sheridan’s sights: teachers. In his opening lecture he talks of the way the schools have failed in providing students with a proper understanding of ‘the visible marks of the pauses and rests of the voice’:
the masters have not only been more negligent in perfecting pupils in the right use of these, but in their method of teaching, have laid down some false rules, under the influence of which, it is impossible that any one can read naturally.
    False rules – the perennial and unavoidable criticism of spelling and punctuation manuals that has continued down to the present day.
    It was perhaps a little unfair to blame the teachers, who for the most part were simply doing what the writers of the best-selling grammars were telling them to do. But Sheridan was right to single out the grammarians, whose focus had largely been on the syntactically intricate sentences of the written language, with little reference to speech other than the most basic recommendations about pausing. Anyone who tried to read a text aloud using the phonetic equations of Murray et al . would never hold an audience for long.
    However, the elocutionists couldn’t stop the grammatical steamroller. It’s clear from the way authors wrote during the eighteenth century that they increasingly felt complex sentences needed a correspondingly explicit punctuation, with every syntactically important element identified to avoid uncertainty over how to read a discourse. The punctuationbecame heavier and heavier, as writers accepted the recommendations of the grammarians, and in cases of doubt added – like David Steel – extra marks.
    The result can be illustrated by a sentence from the preface to Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1755):
It will sometimes be found, that the accent is placed by the authour quoted, on a different syllable from that marked in the alphabetical series; it is then to be understood, that custom has varied, or that the authour has, in my opinion, pronounced wrong.
    It’s easy to see what has happened: a comma is used to identify the main chunks of syntax