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No Punctuation Period: Difference between revisions
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{{quote|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]]''<ref>The final dot is one of the three punctuation signs in the whole ending chapter.</ref>}}
[[Self-Demonstrating Article|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 [[Big 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, [[Grammar Nazi|some brave netizens Tropers among them]], who have taken up arms to fight back the [[Serious Business|scourge of illiteracy]].
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== [[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!
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** 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 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.
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* 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.
== Stand-up Comedy ==
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== Tabletop Games ==
* In ''[[Dungeons
== [[Theatre]] ==
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** 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.
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[[Category:Bad Writing Index]]
[[Category:Fanfic Tropes]]
[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]
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