No Punctuation Period

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

—James Joyce, Ulysses[1]

So youve found what seems to be a good Fanfic I mean you havent started reading it yet but its got a good description and better yet your OTP is in it Of course you have to read it thusly you click on it and beg wait um what is this where are the periods the question marks exclamation points Oh god no commas or colons no no NOOOOOOOOoooooo

Alas, you've just stumbled into a relic of the No Punctuation Period, a horrible time in which people apparently forgot how sentences were built. Taken to extremes it can result in a visual Wall of Text, thus adding to its unreadability. Sadly, this happens outside of Fan Fics too, as many Tropers could tell you. There are a few havens of good style, some brave netizens Tropers among them, who have taken up arms to fight back the scourge of illiteracy.

Often goes hand in hand with All Lowercase Letters. Has absolutely nothing to do with No Periods, Period or Zero Punctuation. Let us mention neither here. Related to Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma.

Sometimes, though, No Punctuation Is Funnier.

Not to be confused with No Periods Period.

Examples of No Punctuation Period include:

Anime and Manga

  • A disturbing trend, in Naruto fanfiction at least, is for all punctuation to be correct except for the complete exclusion of periods in speaking sentences, despite periods being everywhere else. Exclamation points and question marks seem to stay in, however.
  • The subtitles on the Spirited Away DVD never have periods - unless they have ellipses, exclamation or question marks, it's nothing.
  • Given that periods are not required in written Japanese, a lot of scanlations are prone to this. Or else! They will end every sentence the same way! With an exclamation mark! Even when it makes no sense! And when it reduces the impact of sentences that had an exclamation mark in Japanese!

Comic Books

  • A rather unusual characteristic of comic books from The Silver Age of Comic Books and forward, particularly those from DC Comics (although Marvel got in its share in 1971), is a complete lack of any punctuation other than exclamation points and question marks. In the beginning it was because the low-quality paper stock would render any small marks, like periods or commas, invisible or illegible. As it stands, the omission of periods and the use of all caps is a stylistic choice, not practiced by all letterers. The dialog is instead structured by comic's own unique punctuation mark, the speech balloon, which provides flow and rhythm via spacial placement, as well as other tone information.
  • Similar things pop in up Archie Comics, so that every sentence tends to end with an exclamation point. It appears that Riverdale is full of people with no inside voices.

Literature

  • One practice of modern poetry is to dispense with punctuation. The most famous example is E. E. Cummings.
  • Can also be done for stylistic reasons: viz., the last chapter of Ulysses. Well, it has one period somewhere in the middle, and one at the end (said by some to indicate an orgasm).
  • There's an early 19th-century satirical work by eccentric but extremely successful businessman Lord Timothy Dexter called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, which was at one point published without punctuation ("stops"), and had all of the missing marks in an appendix, with a note about how readers could sprinkle them through the text as they desired. The first editions didn't have the punctuation page; it was added as a Take That in later ones.
  • David Mayne's The Book of Samson only has two commas in the entire novel. (Although other punctuation marks are used.)
  • The fiction of Portuguese novelist José Saramago features only periods and commas, and nothing more. Furthermore, there's no indication of dialogue or who's talking what, except that each piece of dialogue starts with capital letters, just as if it was written normally. Finally, his paragraphs extend over pages. Sweden awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
    • The thing is, he pulls it off. After the first few pages, it stops being difficult to follow, and he uses it effectively to set his tone.
  • Kind of justified examples can be found quite commonly in older novels and such works, where the current rules of grammar and spelling were non-existent at the time, and hence the punctuation (and general spelling/grammar) is all over the place. Pretty much the entirety of Robinson Crusoe is a good example of this, although there are many others.
  • "On The Train" is one of the most Egregious examples. Despite the majority of the punctuation being relatively correct, the story contained no commas whatsoever.
  • The entirety of the original Italian text of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose was written without a single semi-colon. This had critics wondering, until the author admitted that it had been written on a typewriter without such a key and he didn't like to backspace and put a comma over a colon.
  • Oh, Cormac McCarthy, why do you hate quotation marks so?
  • The second part of The Sound and the Fury, narrated by a somewhat unstable Quentin, gradually discards all grammar and punctuation and devolves into a single run-on sentence that goes on for pages.
  • "The Idea of Perfection" by Kate Grenville doesn't use quotation marks. It's still a fantastic read.
  • The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros never, ever seems to use quotation marks. You have to figure out who's talking.
  • Same with Cry the Beloved Country, in imitation of the King James Bible. Justified since the main character is a preacher.
  • Justified in the Archy and Mehitabel poems by Don Marquis: Archy is a cockroach who writes by jumping headfirst onto the keys of Marquis's typewriter. This means he can't type anything that requires holding down the shift key.
  • There is a lack of punctuation throughout Guitar Highway Rose, depending on whose point of view the section is from. This makes dialogue very confusing at times.
  • Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, apparently dislikes quotation marks, instead using an en dash at the beginning of a paragraph to indicate someone is speaking.
  • The book The Usual Rules by Joyce Maynard never uses quotation marks when anyone is speaking. In fact, the only time quotation marks are used is when another author's poem is quoted.
  • Trainspotting has different punctuation rules based on the point-of-view character. Each chapter is from a different perspective. Some of the narrators are better about it than others.

Newspaper Comics

  • The speech balloons in Garfield never end with a period. They end only with an exclamation point, question mark, or a hyphen or dash to indicate interruption. Sentences that do not terminate with the end of a speech balloon would have normal punctuation.

Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

Tabletop Games

  • In Dungeons & Dragons, dwarven language contains little punctuation, just red highlighting for important words and slashes between sentences.

Theatre

Video Games

  • Breath of Fire III: when the last word in a text box is also the end of a sentence, it never ends in a period. It's an exclamation point, a question mark, an ellipsis or nothing.
    • Breath of Fire I and Breath of Fire II both did the same thing, which makes one wonder whether this was actually a mistake or done for stylistic reasons. The latter seems like the obvious choice on paper, but reading the in-game dialogue brings significant doubt to this theory.
  • Every sentence in the original Japanese Pokémon games ends in either an exclamation point, question mark, or ellipses. One with a period was finally added for Pokémon Gold and Silver; it describes what happens when a Pokémon uses the move "Splash" (nothing).
  • Another professional example: in Xenogears, even though the dialogue was very colorful with all sorts of things (intentional misspellings not included), some sentences do not have periods, possibly due to the Blind Idiot Translation.
  • Rin's rambling in Katawa Shoujo is written like this. In one massive Wall of Text.
  • Vell-os telepathy in EV Nova (which is text-only for dialog) is depicted with no punctuation or capitalization. <it looks like this>

Web Comics

  • Roast Beef of Achewood (and Nice Pete as well)'s speech balloons have a lower sized font than the rest of the comic's population, and no punctuation. Presumably this reflects a quiet, flat tone of voice.
  • Homestuck has several characters typing like this.
    • Dave Strider and Aradia Megido type with no punctuation, but split the text up so a period equals a new line.
    • Nepeta Leijon and Terezi Pyrope only use exclamation and question marks.
    • Kanaya Maryam doesn't use punctuation, but continues at the next line each time punctuation is required.
    • Equius Zahhak doesn't use any punctuation except commas.
    • Eridan Ampora not only doesn't use punctuation, he often types multiple sentences on one line.

Web Original

  • Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw was told that his rapidly-narrated reviews sound like they have no punctuation, and so they were named Zero Punctuation. One review shows what is apparently his script. It seems to consist mostly of long sentences with no commas.
  • Lucy on The War Comms barely even knows what a Shift key is. Rod and Sue can be pretty bad about this sometimes, too.
  • This sometimes happens with TV Tropes examples
  • YouTube video captions generated using their Transcribe Audio feature are often like this.

Real Life

  • In a wholly justified example, the ancient Romans didn't use punctuation as we know it, so all Latin written in the Classical period would appear this way (including extant inscriptions). As a result, modern-day Latinists can't trust the punctuation that has long since been added to the vast majority of Latin literature which has been transmitted through the centuries via copied and recopied manuscripts.
    • For that matter, Greek and the other languages of the day had similar problems. And they did not put spaces between words, either. And scribes misspelled or transposed words. Let's just say there are a lot of headaches involved with the text of certain works even when they have come down whole.
      • For those who want a bit more concrete an example: The New Testament is, in fact, one of the best preserved manuscripts—many copies and fragments of copies have survived, and most of the oldest ones have surfaced in the last century. On a collated text—one created by combining every copy available—it is pretty much impossible to find a page where there isn't anything footnoted with an explanation of why they chose the version they did and what the variants were, in space-saving standardized code. (And this is also a text that was usually proofread, as evidenced by some copies having corrections; apparently it was suspected that God might be a Grammar Nazi.) The different readings of punctuation can be important; a significant difference between the Catholic and Protestant churches is derived from whether Jesus said "Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise," or "Amen, I say to you today, you will be with me in Paradise."
      • The King James Version and several other Bible translations have a whole load of words in italics, seemingly at random, because translators added those words to make the text work under English grammar. Some [other] translations use [square] brackets instead to denote insertions. Adding these words appears to explicitly endorse one of a range of possible readings of the original text.
  • And all of the above instances can be derived from the fact that true spoken language contains very few punctuation marks anyway. As a test, try recording and transcribing five minutes of casual conversation (especially between children), and try to find where to put the full stops. Alternatively, write a speech, then read it, and try to make it sound natural while maintaining the exact punctuation you used when writing.
  • TELEGRAMS NOT PUNCTUATED STOP MAY BE EXAMPLE OF TROPE STOP USAGE OF STOP INSTEAD OF PERIOD OR FULL STOP REDUCES ALPHABET SIZE BY OBSOLETING PUNCTUATION STOP
    • Telegrams not punctuated. May be example of trope. Usage of. Instead of period or full. Reduces alphabet size by obsoleting punctuation. In hindsight, if somebody wanted to actually say "stop", there was a small chance of the message being lost if the telegrapher was not experienced.
  • Written Japanese in general, outside of a "formal writing" context (i.e., letters, books, or essays), tends to not bother much with punctuation at all, periods especially. Japanese natively has only a period and a comma, and doesn't use spaces (not that it really needs them, the kanji help a lot with word boundaries). Punctuation can often be omitted, but often writers will employ extra punctuation - English exclamation points and question marks are used to evoke the specific feel that these characters add to a sentence, even if they aren't strictly necessary.
    • Also with Classical Chinese, where punctuation is never used. This has led to a very fun type of exam question where the student is presented with a block of text and has to add the punctuation (made easier by the fact that Classical Chinese is written in a highly rhythmic and formalized style, finding the places to pause tend to come naturally after one reads the passages a few dozen times).
    • Japanese is justified in the fact that it has punctuation... words. That's right. Both exclamation points (yo) and question marks (ka) are actual particles placed as the last syllable of the sentence. For instance, "Kore ga hon desu" --> "This is a book." "Kore ga hon desu yo" --> "This is a book!" "Kore ga hon desu ka" --> "This is a book?" It really makes exclamation points/question marks unnecessary, since the meaning is always clear.
  • Biblical Hebrew had no punctuation, and no vowels. This means that you had to know the words to be able to read the text, and that since many words were identical except in vowels, there are many ambiguities.
    • The fact that you're not supposed to say the True Name of the LORD ("YHWH", also known as "The Tetragrammaton") except on special occasions is conveniently reinforced by the fact that its pronunciation has actually been lost, so we couldn't say it even if we wanted. It's guessed that it's Yahweh, or is just read with the vowels from adonai (a less holy near-synonym).
    • It is specifically to reduce these ambiguities that Hebrew and Arabic have methods of writing vowels at all - the structure of the languages are such that they're pretty much readable without short vowels (mn lngwgs 'r 'ctll ths wy t sm dgry), but people came up with vowel "points" (symbols above and below the letters) to eliminate any questions that might arise through this omission. Most non-religious texts still leave them out.
    • In sections of the Talmud dealing with specific Biblical verses, the authors will frequently point out that some relevant word, if pronounced with different vowel sounds, can mean something completely different, and this is used as a way to tease out hidden levels of meaning embedded in the text. Relatedly, the fact that a reader has to know the words already in order to read the text is sometimes given as evidence of the existence of a parallel oral tradition that was given in conjunction to, and simultaneously with, the written text - since the written text on its own is unreadable (or at least hopelessly ambiguous) without some sort of extra-textual instructions for pronunciation.
  • Joined-up alphabets such as Arabic and cursive English often contain many pairs or sets of letters which are mostly, or completely, identical except for the placement of dots meant to distinguish them. Originally, these dots weren't there. This meant you often couldn't tell, except by already knowing the words and judging from context, if a given Arabic letter was (for example) an F or Q, or in the worst possible case, a B, T, TH, N, or Y. English is not as susceptible, but it still has U vs. II, and I vs. T.
  • Well known Dutch football (that's soccer for you in the US of A) commentator Willem van Hanegem struggles and has fun with this. One of his friends had the following anecdote.
    • Willem often sent me letter back in the day. Often, the punctuation was off. One time, he sent over a letter which was just one long sentence, going on and on. He ended the letter with a bunch of dots and comma's and a post scriptum: My friend, please see fit to fill in all the dots and comma's where you think they might look nice.
  • There are a few reasons why people on the internet would type without punctuation nowadays:
  1. ↑ The final dot is one of the three punctuation signs in the whole ending chapter.
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