The Psychology of Punctuation

FORMAL REFERENCE:

Thorndike, E.L. “The Psychology of Punctuation.” 1948. The American Journal of Psychology
Vol. 61, No. 2 (Apr., 1948), pp. 222-228. JSTOR (accessed February 10, 2011)

RELEVANT SECTIONS:
pp 222-228

SUMMARY:

Thorndike argues that punctuation conveys more than just grammatical functions like pauses and structure, but instead “influences emphasis, movement, and style. Further, he conducts a study in which he analyzes the punctuation of different authors and finds that each has a unique “punctuation profile” indicative of that person’s writing style.

Further, he believes that English’s changing nature can be seen in even the most basic of language elements, the punctuation… the colon, for example, used to be far more popular but now are only about a tenth as such. Punctuation, then, is not hard and fast but adaptive and qualitative, or as the author puts it, “normative.”

The author concludes that punctuation patterns can be used to determine the topic, the authorial personality, the mood, and the meaning of writing, though he thinks it’s not a good measure of the writer’s total personality. He suggests further tests of the degree to which these punctuation profiles match author personality.

ASSESSMENT:

This article is completely academic and reviewed, and the author is quite renowned. The only drawback is the age of the paper—it’s from 1948. However, this topic Is not really time- sensitive, and thus it’s quite usable.

The study the author performed was done by tabulating punctuation from 50 pages of 400 words each, as a nonrandom sample (picked authors) in order to form a punctuation profile.

REFLECTION:

The revelation that different authors have markedly different punctuation profiles is interesting and hints that personality and other factors like subject and time period are reflected in punctuation choice. If punctuation was just for structure and syntax, one would expect to see much more similarity between authors, times and subjects, but this is not the case.

This article is a good argument for the idea that there are definite things to investigate in punctuation—from emphasis to mood.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

punctuation, personality, profiling, research, statistics, mood