Adaptation – Punctuation and Literature

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Choice Reading · Ready for C2 Proficiency Workbook, Macmillan

You are going to read an article about punctuation and literature. For questions 1–6, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

In one of the more ludicrous skirmishes of the intergenerational culture wars, linguists declared this week that Gen Z has 'cancelled' the full stop. As usual, technology is the battleground: apparently the decline of this most humble punctuation mark is the result of the proliferation of digital communication among teens. There is decent evidence to support this claim: a 2015 study by Binghamton University in New York found that undergraduates perceived text messages ending in a full stop to be less sincere than those without. When it comes to digital communication, punctuation is being squeezed out. Despite the lack of evidence that this is in any way a 'Gen Z' phenomenon, rather than a 'people who text' one – most of 2015's undergraduates were actually millennials – teenagers have inevitably borne the brunt of the punctuation purists' fury. Almost everything about these accusations is rubbish, period. Playing fast and loose with punctuation is hardly some piece of sexy stylistic radicalism – it's a century-old literary technique used by the creators of modern literature. Modernism questioned the comfortable conventions of the traditional novel with its well-constructed plots, clear chapter-divisions and satisfying endings. To writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, such order was artificial; they experimented with looser, smudgier forms of prose that reflected the loosened, smudged certainties of a world in ruins. One casualty was consistent punctuation: the final chapter of Ulysses is one infamous sentence. It's tempting to think of punctuation as fundamental to communication, a scaffolding without which language would fall apart. But history tells us something different: punctuation is a written convention, as arbitrary as writing horizontally across a page. Ancient Greek texts contain no gaps between words, let alone full stops. It was a system invented (in the late medieval and early modern period, mostly) solely for ease of communication. We owe punctuation nothing. Modernists like Woolf and Joyce argued that their grammar-lite literature was more mimetic of reality than the so-called 'realism' of nineteenth-century novels. No one thinks in full sentences or arranges their thoughts into paragraphs. 'Life,' Woolf famously wrote, 'is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.' Punctuation is the gig lamps, useful but artificial; free-flowing prose is the more truthful envelope of consciousness. This isn't to deny that the proliferation of instant technological communication has had an impact on our use (or under-use) of punctuation. It's merely to suggest that such under-use doesn't herald the collapse of communication as we know it. Quite the reverse: the rich resurgence of fiction that takes a sceptical, playful approach to punctuation in recent years is not unconnected to our digital age. In 2019, for example, Lucy Ellmann's 1000-page novel Ducks, Newburyport, one part of which was made up of a single sentence, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The joint winner that same year, Bernadine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, dispensed with full stops and capital letters, instead signifying pauses through line breaks, like poetry. And perhaps the most important British author of the last 20 years, Zadie Smith, abandoned speech marks in her 2012 novel NW, a technique recently adopted, to much comment, by digital-native writers such as Sally Rooney and Daisy Johnson. When one too many journalists asked her about this, Rooney's exasperated response was: 'I mean, it's a novel written in the first person, isn't it all quotation?' Such technical variations reflect more than literary bling – they leak through the language and shape the stories they tell. What is most memorable about Smith's writing is the voices of her characters: loud, multicultural, multitudinous. Removing the speech marks peels away a barrier between those voices and the reader: they speak inside your head or over your shoulder. Similarly, Johnson and Rooney's stories of intense relationships are studded with fragments of whip-smart dialogue – when you look down at the page, at the characters' words tangling into each other, something of their intimacy stares back at you. Evaristo's style is perhaps the most radical. When you first read Girl, Woman, Other, it feels contrived, the odd-looking pages undulating with paragraph breaks. So why did she do it? It's a novel that is always slipping. Amma, the primary character, finds herself sliding from the social margins into the establishment; other characters flirt between entirely different identities. Is this a comfortable process? Rarely. But by the end of the novel, you have entirely forgotten its punctuation is unconventional. The little black dot of a barrier proves as unnecessary as the barriers we use to separate different kinds of people. That's a powerful statement from a black woman writer. Perhaps we should all let our punctuation slide.

illustrate how research results can be misused to support weak claims.

suggest that a new phenomenon appears predominantly in digital communication.

validate an assertion about generational changes in language use.

highlight differences in the way young people interpret punctuation.

The writer mentions a 2015 study in order to

It rejected the use of punctuation as a means of communicating a message.

It ushered in a variety of techniques that are still in widespread use today.

It challenged accepted norms that readers had come to expect.

It set about to portray the unpleasant realities of its time.

According to the writer, how was modernism different from earlier literary styles?

It is a manufactured construct with no inherent value.

It would have made historic texts easier to process.

It is vital for expressing complex ideas in writing.

It can hinder the realistic representation of thought.

How does the writer suggest she feels about punctuation?

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