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In a written work descriptive text is intended to be read, it should convey its meaning as effectively as possible and, as Accumulation has said, the purpose of the punctuation is to help make the ...
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#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T12:57:02Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47992 License name: CC BY-SA 4.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#2: Initial revision
by
Chris Barry
·
2019-12-08T12:57:02Z (almost 5 years ago)
In a written work descriptive text is intended to be read, it should convey its meaning as effectively as possible and, as Accumulation has said, the purpose of the punctuation is to help make the meaning clear, not to indicate pacing. Dialogue is quite different. The reader is trying to understand the thoughts of the speaker, who cannot be assumed to be even trying to make his meaning clear. The reader should be trying to ignore the fact that he is reading text and concentrating on imagining what the speaker would actually sound like. In this context punctuation is concerned only with pacing and inflection. For this, I think, only comma, full stop, exclamation and question marks are useful. Some people may claim that colon and semicolon can convey subtle differences in the lengths of pauses, but I suspect that most people would associate them with lists and not find them helpful within dialogue.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-09-14T01:10:06Z (about 5 years ago)
Original score: 1