ESR on punctuation
ESR discusses different punctuation styles. What he calls the ‘eloqutionist’ style is the punctuation style I used intuitively as a child and young adult. It was somewhat beaten out of me by the prescriptivist grammarian regime which ascribes strict syntactic rules to the placement of punctuation marks. This has always seems arbitrary and in some cases leads to absurd results (two examples are the placement of a period after quotes or parenthesis; the programmer in my wants it to fall outside of the parens/quotes, but the syntact fetishists don’t seem to mind the ugly asymmetry of it all). <– See what I did there? That’s where the period should go. If it falls within the parenthesis, it’s like it’s a period on the bit in parens, not the whole sentence. Ugly!
Before reading ESR’s article I didn’t realize there was a legitimate literary tradition of eloqutionist punctuation, and I’m a bit dismayed that I have for the most part kicked the habit due to the aforementioned sylistic oppression of the ruling prescriptivist regime. Maybe I can train myself back now that it no longer matters what English PhDs think of my writing.