Via Poynter Online, Roy Peter Clark says: On National Punctuation Day, let's celebrate white space. Excerpt:
During the newspaper design revolution of the 1980s and 90s, writers often made fun of white space. Bad idea, scribes.
Inside the text, white space is a writer's and a reader's best friend. White space helps emphasize what is most important on the page or screen, provides a kind of visual index that clues in the reader to the main parts of the story, and ventilates tedious grayness, relaxing the eyes and reassuring the mind.
White space, I would argue, should be considered a form of punctuation, partly because other traditional marks of punctuation work have been designed to create it.
Let's take, for example, borscht belt comedian Henny Youngman's most famous joke, which I found punctuated four different ways online:
1. Take my wife, please.
2. Take my wife ... please.
3. Take my wife. Please.
4. Take my wife -- please.
If the secret of humor is timing, then the secret of timing on the page is punctuation. In this case, my preference is #4. The comma offers the least separation between the premise and the punch line. The ellipsis is too airy. The period separates elements of a complete thought, turning what should be one sentence into two. But the dash manages to both connect and separate the elements. Notice that part of that separation is the creation of white space between "wife" and "please."
One of the great purveyors of white space is the bulleted list, a textual element that gained prominence during the design revolution and has found a comfortable new home on the Internet.
A bullet comes to English from French and means "little ball," a reference not just to a gun projectile but also -- in printing -- to "a heavy dot used to highlight a passage." A list of such highlighted passages is called a bulleted list.
Such a strategy offers writers and readers these benefits:
•The ability to check information at a glance.
•Information conveyed in tight spaces.
•Order, at least the appearance of order.
•Relief to the eye and the mind in the form of white space.
For more about National Punctuation Day, see my post on Ask the English Teacher.
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