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Punctuation will help to solve this riddle quickly. Insert a semicolon after the word "nails" in the second line, and a comma after the word five in the third line. Thus, the riddle would read:

'Every lady in the land

Has twenty nails; upon each hand
Five, and twenty on hands and feet."

Earle says:

"The sentence which would be ambiguous without stops is a badly constructed sentence," and the following, cited by Mr. De Vinne,' helps to prove it:

"The prisoner said the witness was a convicted thief."

In this sentence the stigma is placed on the witness, but the fact is that it should have been put on the prisoner; so:

"The prisoner, said the witness, was a convicted thief."

Every manuscript should be carefully punctuated before it is submitted to a publisher or sent to the printer. By paying particular attention to this, authors will be able not only to insure the correct interpretation of their thoughts, 1 The Practise of Typography, p. 260.

but also to remove the liability of being misread, and be able to reduce the expense usually incurred for correction.

If an author possesses an accurate knowledge of punctuation, as well as the faculty to apply this knowledge consistently, he can not afford to trust to the printer for the correct punctuation (which often means also the correct interpretation of the meaning) of his manuscript. If he be not qualified to attend to the subject himself, he would better call in expert help or request his publisher to have the work done for him.

If, as is claimed by Wendell, "Punctuation is to do for the eye what emphasis does for the ear," then it is an important appanage of style, and, as such, authors should jealously preserve it. Needless punctuating is both bad and costly-as bad and as costly as omitting punctuation when it is necessary. Yet if punctuation is to do for the eye what emphasis does for the ear, how will it fare in the hands of a writer of spasmodic temperament? Probably as poorly as would emphasis at the lips of a man who stutters.

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Two styles of punctuation are in use to-day. One is termed "close," the other "open. Close punctuation is formal and constrained, and lacks the natural flow of words which open punctuation produces. Close punctuation is to be found often

in English books printed in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries. The practise of writing sentences of inordinate length made close punctuation necessary to their correct interpretation. When the short and direct sentence superseded its clumsy predecessor, open punctuation was practised. But there is a class of writers of even short sentences that follows the practise now almost abandoned in England, and preserved only by lawyers and pedants in the United States. On this subject Mr. De Vinne says that "a comparison of the punctuation of early and late editions of English classics will show that the tendency of modern editors is to a more sparing use of points.

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Punctuation is of four kinds:

1. Grammatical punctuation, used to indicate a greater or less degree of separation in the relations of the thought, as by division into sentences, clauses, and phrases, to aid in the better comprehension of the meaning and grammatical relation of the words.

The points used in grammatical punctuation. are: the comma (,); the semicolon (;); the colon (:); the period or full point (.), and the dash (—). 2. Rhetorical punctuation is used to mark some peculiarity in expression.

1 The Practise of Typography, p. 292.

The points used are: the note of exclamation or ecphoneme (!); the note of interrogation or eroteme (?); the dash (-); the quotation-marks or guillemets, used singly or in pairs (“. ; '), and the parentheses or curves-( ).

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3. Etymological punctuation is used to indicate something concerning the formation, use, or omission of words or parts of words.

The marks used are: the caret (^); the dieresis (); the macron or macrotone ( ̄), a mark of quantity used to designate length, as of vowel sound or syllable; the breve or stenotone (~), a mark of quantity used to designate a close vowel sound or a short syllable; the acute accent ('), used to denote stress in pronunciation; the grave accent (`), used to denote a falling inflection or an open or long vowel; the circumflex (^), used to denote a broad or long sound; the hyphen (-, =), used to connect syllables of a word when separated, as at the end of a line or to connect the two elements (or more) of a compound word, and the period (.), used to denote an abbreviation.

4. Punctuation for reference is used to refer the reader to some other place in the page or book.

The marks used are the asterisk or star (*); the dagger or obelisk (†); the double dagger or

diesis (); the section (§); the parallel (); the paragraph (); the index (); and the asterism (*** or ***). In cases where the references are numerous these marks are sometimes doubled, but in such cases modern usage inclines to the use of superior figures (' '), which are preferable, except in books which treat technical subjects, as in these superior, and sometimes inferior, figures (,,,) are used for other purposes. Superior letters also are occasionally used (a, b). Ellipses, as in quotations, are usually designated by three periods or stars (. . .; ***). Brackets ([]) are used when the purpose is to separate sentences that have been interpolated as comments on remarks in parentheses.

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