It’s an added difficulty to an activity often sought out to get people away from the difficulty of life: of work and school and family mayhem. You have to work harder to get the meaning, to understand the text, or even to understand on the surface level what’s actually going on if thoughts and dialogue intermingle.
Just because you can understand the text without them doesn’t mean the little marks don’t have a function. Doctorow once said quotation marks aren’t necessary since “you can tell when it’s dialogue,” but Miller argues that doesn’t mean you should get rid of it. Laura Miller in her article “ All I want for Christmas is quotation marks” published in Salon back in 2009 made a rebuttal against the practice.
Dorothy Richardson, despite forgoing quotation marks in her works, told Bryher in The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs that it was a mistake and that it created “ unnecessary difficulties” for her readers. This can sometimes, intentionally, add a layer of difficulty to the reading experience. Why Keep Quotation Marks Right Where They Are? They indicated passages were from another source or, later, they marked dialogue, which is the way they more or less function today. At this time, the meaning of the word quote took on the way we see them, as a grammatical tool for the reading eye. According to Finnegan, they were dubbed “inverted commas” for their shape and their function, and while it took a while, they moved from being an indicator from the margins to being part of the line of the text itself through the 17th century. Later, the diple was replaced by a double comma with the invention of the printing press and, with it, a need to standardize the format of citations. Funnily enough, Ruth Finnegan in Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Punctuation wrote these variations were seen as “corrupt” and indicated scribes had forgotten “how their elders and betters had indicated citations” which just goes to show these adaptations of punctuation, and the societal pushback (or niche acceptance) are par for the course. They functioned as indicators of how to say something, when to pause, or even where to take a breath. Writers’ use of the mark varied person to person, sometimes dotted or curved, sometimes vertical, sometimes reversed. It was named “diple”, meaning double, after the number of pen strokes it took to create. Back then, the function was more of an attention grabber, placed in the margins of a piece at moments of emphasis whether it be dialogue or description or even additional commentary. The quotation mark developed from what was known as a diple, carrot-looking mark used in Greek texts.
0 kommentar(er)
