Thursday, December 22, 2011

Punctuating for prosody or for syntax—With a dash of the dash


My earlier discussion of heavy and light punctuation encompassed only today’s trivial differences in punctuation density, but the differences are much greater across the centuries. Samples from Ben Jonson illustrate the early 17th century’s predominant style of punctuation when writers punctuated based on prosody instead of syntax, marking wherever the reader should pause.

If you, my Sonne, should, now, preuaricate,
And, to your owne particular lusts, employ
So great, and catholique a blisse; Be sure,
A curse will follow, yea, and ouertake
Your subtle, and most secret wayes.
This earlier English literature shows exactly what’s wrong with the practice of punctuating whenever you hear a pause: by contemporary standards, you’ll over-punctuate.

The history of written English runs from heavier to lighter punctuation and from reliance on prosody to reliance on syntax. Logically, prosodic punctuation and heavy punctuation need not go together. To lighten punctuation, it's true you must omit punctuating some pauses, but in principle, punctuating for prosody allows degrees of punctuation density; presumably, you would punctuate the longer pauses and omit the shorter. Perhaps English didn’t follow that route because differences in pause length can be hard to ascertain reliably, but the reason for syntactic-punctuation’s lightness is clearer: an excess of syntactic punctuation confuses readers because syntactic elements are nested, whereas our means of punctuating allows only two levels within a sentence. Prosodic punctuation can be dense without confusion, since its only burden is telling the reader to pause.

The main reason punctuation is increasingly based on syntax is that writing is increasingly distinct from speech. How readers should render passages aloud matters less today; how readers should parse passages matters more. Although syntactic punctuation dominates, some writers disagree—and I don’t make any claims about the punctuation appropriate to fiction, dialog being peculiarly prosodic. Also, the purposes behind common punctuation practices conflict, with some accepted practices being based on prosody. The rule that a comma follows any introductory element is a prosodic rule, in contrast to a purely syntactic rule that would omit the comma after a restrictive modifier, such as an introductory “if” clause. Another example of contemporary prosodic punctuation is the use of a comma within a compound predicate where the verbs strongly contrast. A third example countenanced by some writers and grammarians uses commas for emphasis, a prosodic consideration that conflicts with syntactic rules under which commas set off nonessential, descriptive elements—usually amounting to de-emphasis.

Conflict between prosodic- and syntactic-punctuation practices sometimes confuses. The fundamental error of comma usage can be diagnosed as due partly to an appetite for prosodic punctuation: a reader often pauses before a coordinating conjunction. Another confusion leads to setting off restrictive adverbial clauses with commas. Still another prosodic temptation, which comes from the need to breathe when you read aloud, is to punctuate long passages. Temptations to separate a restrictive adverbial clause and to punctuate a long passage here reinforce comma-usage’s fundamental error of punctuating a compound sentence element. (HT: an old posting in WordReference.com.):

Maury licked his lips as Cherise, the dental assistant, leaned over him to adjust the table holding the sharp, shiny tools the oral surgeon would need, and wished his rotten old teeth were strong enough to pierce her lovely jugular.

The forum debated whether a comma goes after need. One commenter pointed out that it's ambiguous whether Maury or Cherise is the one wishing about Maury’s teeth, and the commenter suggested that a comma after need might clarify that it's Maury. A single extra comma doesn’t help, but a couple of commas—the other one after lipswould set off the adverbial clause beginning with as and ending with need. But we would be punctuating for prosody, using reading pauses to clarify meaning; from the syntactic standpoint, commas would improperly set off a restrictive clause. Creating prosodic breaks, such as interrupting sentence flow with a restrictive element, is the almost-exclusive function of the dash:
Maury licked his lipsas Cherise, the dental assistant, leaned over him to adjust the table holding the sharp, shiny tools the oral surgeon would needand wished his rotten old teeth were strong enough to pierce her lovely jugular.
If, as there’s reason to expect, the trend toward punctuating for syntax instead of prosody continues, the future will falsify prophesies of the dash’s demise. As writing detaches from speech, prosodic punctuation doesn’t disappear, but writers can quarantine it within dashes.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

“Decision fatigue”: Its implications for analyzing issues on appeal

A controversial theory from psychology, decision fatigue carries unconventional implications for brief writing. The theory holds that the act of choosing and other acts of self-control draw on a limited store of energy, which you can only fully replenish with a night’s sleep, although drinking or eating sugar brings immediate relief. When you run out of decision-making juice, you avoid choosing or you choose impulsively, and you are more apt to lose self-control, whether by raging at someone, failing to persevere at an unpleasant task, or (especially) over-eating. While people are depleted by too many choices and although people should economize on their decision-making, avoiding choice isn’t always the answer, since unwanted tasks also deplete the energy store devoted to self-control.

Decision fatigue explains some experiences of writers. The writing process is decision laden, which probably explains the paucity of words—estimated as low as 500—a writer can set down in good order on any given day. The replenishment sugar provides explains why writers tend to get fat—if they do—although I only get scrawnier.

These experiences were never terribly hard to explain, but you probably wouldn’t expect the following, which exposes a source of judicial bias. In an Israeli study, researchers found that decisions were favorable to candidates for parole in 70% of cases heard in the early morning, but 10% of cases heard in the late afternoon. Research reports emphasize that the judges react to depletion by opting for the default, but for lawyers’ purposes, the most important finding may be that the court’s default option is to deny a petition.

While the study dealt with only a single venue, it suggests that depleting the judge’s willpower disadvantages the petitioner—a result providing writers of appellants’ briefs with another reason to avoid issue proliferation—but the respondent may benefit from the judge's depletion. The effect is probably not as strong as in the Israeli parole hearings, where the risk of granting parole was much greater than of denying it; whereas in an appellate case, reversal is only moderately more risky than affirmance. The difference is enough to make affirmance the default alternative, experienced as involving less choice, mainly because the reversing court has to state publicly that colleagues erred.

If depleting the judge’s supply of willpower benefits respondents, they may help themselves by using a slightly subversive strategy. The respondent should try to increase the judge’s decisional load yet must also avoid confusing or antagonizing the judge by originating needless complexity. The respondent can sometimes achieve these often-opposed goals jointly by repackaging the issues presented on appeal. Knowing that that decision fatigue benefits respondents should reduce their worry that restating the issues to simplify their briefs complexifies decision-making by the courts, which, depletingly, must now consider competing issue sets.

The work on decision fatigue, undertaken primarily by Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues, has been criticized by social psychologist Carol Dweck, who found that believing you have an unlimited supply of willpower can enable acting as if you have it abundantly. Although popular coverage of Dweck’s research has submerged the original findings, the Dweck research bears little practical significance. People can eke out painfully higher levels of willpower, but they don’t ordinarily want to.