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Punctuation in Practice: a Workshop

June 28, 2015

My mind is spinning.

Last weekend I attended “Punctuation in Practice”, a workshop on punctuation held at the leafy Dahlem campus of Berlin’s Freie Universität. I was there along with six other participants at the invitation of Dr Elizabeth Bonapfel, a postdoctoral fellow who has written extensively on American and English literature, with a particular focus on James Joyce1 and a more recent interest in the punctuation of speech in 18^th century drama and literature. Other attendees included Charles Lock, professor of English at the university of Copenhagen, Dr Anne Toner of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Dr Stewart Brookes, research associate in digital palaeography at King’s College, London; and suffice it to say the other presenters were not exactly lacking in academic heft, either.

A reminder: how to subscribe to Shady Characters

June 16, 2015

There have been a welter of informative and thought-provoking comments here lately (including some from Choz Cunningham, inventor of the snark, or “.~”), but all this activity is sometimes a little hard to follow. As such, I thought I’d post a reminder that it’s possible to subscribe directly to posts and to comments via dedicated RSS feeds.

It’s (traditional Chinese) paperback publication day!

June 8, 2015

Another day, another edition of Shady Characters! The handsome book on the right is the Chinese complex characters (also called traditional characters) edition, courtesy of Taiwan’s Rye Field Publications. The cover design is by Chang Lien Hung, aka elf-19, and I can promise you that it is far better looking in real life than my terrible photo makes it out to be. It is available now for ¥360. I’d love to hear what Chinese-literate readers might think of it — if you lay your hands on a copy, please leave a comment below or drop me a line via the contact form!

Miscellany № 62: the absence of punctuation

Just the one punctuation-related link this week: Shady Characters is upping sticks and moving to London this coming week, and blogging time is scarce!

May 26, 2015

So: to Canada, where the National Post recently reported on a PhD thesis that contains no conventional punctuation.1 Submitted to the University of British Columbia by architect Patrick Stewart, a member of the Nisga’a First Nation, each of the chapters of Stewart’s dissertation opens with a summary written in standard academic English but the bulk of the work is presented without uppercase letters, full stops or commas. Stewart holds a select few marks in reserve for more troublesome concepts — a forward slash “connects words of similar meaning / emphasis”; an ellipsis “indicates a continuity of thought”; and the question mark survives intact — but, on the whole, his thesis is, as he describes it, “one long, run-on sentence, from cover to cover”.

Miscellany № 61: verbal irony seeks meaningful relationship. No, really.

April 13, 2015

Well, hello there.

You all know the handsome fellow that adorns the cover of this book, don’t you? This is the ironieteken, the brainchild of type designer Bas Jacobs, and it is used to terminate an ironic statement.1 Specifically, it is intended to punctuate verbal irony, where a speaker or writer says one thing but means another. It is, to my mind, the most visually convincing irony mark to date — but for the purposes of today’s short post, it is merely one of the many suitors who have tried and failed to win irony’s hand in marriage.