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. The word is derived from the Latin punctus, “point.” From the 15th century to the early 18th the subject was known in English as pointing; and the term punctuation, first recorded in the middle of the 16th century, was reserved for the insertion of vowel points (marks placed near consonants to indicate preceding or following vowels) in Hebrew texts. The two words exchanged meanings between 1650 and 1750.

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Al-Nahrain University
College of Engineering
Architectural Department
Punctuations
A report submitted by:
HUSSEIN AZHER
3RD
Year / 2ND
Semester
English Language
Asst. Lecturer Abubaker K. Mustafa

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To
Everyone who helped anyone with anything

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List of contents
No. Tittle Page No.
1 List of contents 3
2 Punctuation 4
3 History 5
4 Printing-press era 6
5 References 10

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Punctuation
The use of spacing, conventionalsigns, and certain typographical
devices as aids to the understandingand correct reading, both
silently and aloud,of handwrittenand printed texts. The word is
derived from the Latin punctus, “point.” From the 15th century to
the early 18th the subject was known in English as pointing;and the
term punctuation,first recorded in the middle of the 16th century,
was reserved for the insertion of vowel points (marks placednear
consonantsto indicate preceding or followingvowels) in Hebrew
texts. The two words exchanged meanings between 1650 and 1750.

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History
Since the late 16th century the theory and practice of punctuation
have varied between two main schools of thought: the elocutionary
school, following late medievalpractice, treated pointsor stops as
indicationsof the pauses of various lengths that might be observed
by a reader, particularlywhen he was reading aloudto an audience;
the syntactic school, which had won
the argument by the end of the 17th
century, saw them as something less
arbitrary, namely, as guides to the
grammatical construction of
sentences. Pauses in speech and
breaks in syntax tend in any case to
coincide;and althoughwriters are now
agreed that the main purpose of
punctuationis to clarify the grammar
of a text, they also require it to take
account of the speed and rhythm of
actual speech.
Syntactic punctuationis, by definition,bad when it obscures rather
than clarifies the construction of sentences. Good punctuation,
however, may be of many kinds: to take two extreme examples,
Henry James would be unintelligiblewithout his numerous

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commas, but Ernest Hemingway seldom needs any stop but the
period. In poetry, in which the elocutionaryaspect of punctuationis
still important, and to a lesser degree in fiction, especiallywhen the
style is close to actual speech, punctuationismuch at the author’s
discretion. In nonfictional
writing there is less room for
experiment. Stimulatingvariant
models for general use might be
the light punctuation of George
Bernard Shaw’s prefaces to his
playsand the heavier
punctuationof T.S. Eliot’s
literary and politicalessays.
Printing-press era
The amount of printed material and its readership began to
increase after the inventionof moveabletype in Europe in the
1450s. As explainedby writer and editor Lynne Truss, "The rise of
printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard
system of punctuationwas urgently required." Printed books,
whose letters were uniform, could be read much more rapidlythan
manuscripts. Rapid reading, or reading aloud,did not allow time to
analyze sentence structures. This increased speed led to the greater
use and finallystandardizationof punctuation,which showed the

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relationshipsof words with each other: where one sentence ends
and another begins, for example.
The introductionof a standard system of punctuationhasalso been
attributed to the Venetianprinters Aldus Manutiusand his
grandson. They have been credited with popularizingthe practice
of ending sentences with the colon or full stop (period), inventing
the semicolon, making occasionaluse of parentheses, and creating
the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus
Manutiusthe Younger was able to state that the main object of
punctuationwas the clarificationof syntax.
By the 19th century, punctuationin the western world had evolved
"to classify the marks hierarchically,in terms of weight". Cecil
Hartley's poem identifies their relative values:
The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause.
At ev'ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three;
The period four, as learnedmen agree.

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The use of punctuationwas not standardised untilafter the
inventionof printing. According to the 1885 edition of The
American Printer, the importance of punctuationwas noted in
varioussayings by children such as:
Charles the First walked and talked
Half an hour after his head was cut off.
With a semi-colon and a comma added
it reads:
Charles the First walked and talked;
Half an hour after, his head was cut off.
In a 19th-century manual of typography, Thomas MacKellarwrites:
Shortly after the inventionof printing, the necessity of stops or
pauses in sentences for the guidanceof the reader produced the
colon and full point. In process of time, the comma was added,
which was then merely a perpendicularline, proportionedto the
body of the letter. These three points were the only ones used until
the close of the fifteenth century, when Aldo Manucciogave a

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better shape to the comma, and added the semicolon; the comma
denoting the shortest pause, the semicolon next, then the colon,
and the full pointterminating the sentence. The marks of
interrogation and admirationwere introducedmany years after.

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References
Truss, Lynne (2004). Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance
Approach to Punctuation.New York: Gotham Books.
Iona and Peter Opie (1943) I Saw Esau.
MacKellar, Thomas(1885). The American Printer: A Manualof
Typography, ContainingPractical Directionsfor Managingall
Departments of a Printing Office, As Well as Complete Instructions
for Apprentices: With Several Useful Tables, Numerous Schemes for
Imposing Forms in Every Variety, Hints to Authors, Etc (Fifteenth –
Revised and Enlarged ed.). Philadelphia:MacKellar, Smiths &
Jordan. p. 63.
https://www.britannica.com/science/science
https://www.growskills.co.uk/blog/read_single/43
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#cite_ref-1