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Punctuation!

An English professor wrote the words

'A woman without her man is nothing'

on the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly.

All of the males in the class wrote:

"A woman, without her man, is nothing."

All the females in the class wrote:

"A woman: without her, man is nothing."

Punctuation is powerful.

When a question mark is placed at the end of a sentence verbal or written the sender better engages the receiver wouldn’t you agree?

When I want to ensure my audience remains fully engaged throughout my presentation, I ask rhetorical questions prior to transitioning to my next point. When you ask a rhetorical question, you create a curiosity for what will follow. You build suspense and then satisfy that curiosity with your prepared answer. This technique works in a five-minute pitch to Hollywood producers or a twenty-minute presentation before a team of venture capitalists. Why does this work so well? Read on.

If your delivery continues for an extended period of time in declarative sentences, it feels like a monologue: a fact-download without any give and take. Even if you’re animated, your delivery style will flat line and lack an exchange with your listeners. Questions give the illusion of an inclusive dialogue, although you’re not waiting for an answer. Ever been to New York City? They have the greatest Italian food! You will see heads nod in agreement as you continue with your story. Where are your opportunities to ask these questions? It’s all about rehearsal.

I print and storyboard my speech or PowerPoints on the wall. If you can’t find a wall spacious enough, do it on the floor. When your presentation is laid out visually, it’s easy to see natural breaks in subject matter and pace your intermittent questioning. How do we plan to generate the revenue? precedes the Business Partners slide. How are we different from the competition? precedes your Unique Value Proposition slide. When you ask the question, your audience becomes curious about the answer. How do you make this look natural and not contrived? Stay tuned.

Rehearsal is the only way to make a stuffy business presentation flow like a seamless story loaded with logic and brimming with brilliance. If delivered with enthusiasm and confidence, your questions and smooth transitions will create a persuasive presentation that’s difficult to resist.

Ken Lodi builds wealth for clients and companies by helping them make good presentations great. Contact us and capture the opportunities others leave behind. www.kenlodi.com 323-932-1026

Punctuation is everything in written language other than the actual letters, including punctuation marks (listed at right), inter-word spaces, capitalization, and indentation.

Punctuation marks are symbols that correspond to neither phonemes (sounds) of a language nor to lexemes (words and phrases), but which serve to indicate the structure and organization of writing, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading it aloud. See orthography.

In English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example, "Woman, without her man, is nothing." and "Woman: without her, man is nothing." have greatly different meanings, as do "Eats shoots and leaves" and "Eats, shoots and leaves".

The rules of punctuation vary with language, location, register, and time, and are constantly evolving. Certain aspects of punctuation are stylistic, and thus the author's (or editor's) choice. Tachygraphic language forms, such as those used in online chat and text messages, may have wildly different rules.

Punctuation History of punctuation

The earliest writing had no capitalization, no spaces, and no punctuation marks. So long as it was restricted to a limited range of topics (initially, recording business transactions), this worked. Expanding the use of writing to more abstract concepts required some way to disambiguate meanings. Until the eighteenth century, punctuation was principally an aid to reading aloud; after that time its development was as a mechanism for ensuring that the text made sense when read silently.

The oldest document that uses punctuation is the Mesha Stele (9th century BC) with points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section.

The Greeks (circa 5th century BC) were using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots, usually two (c.f. the modern colon) or three. Greek playwrights (e.g. Euripides and Aristophanes) used symbols to distinguish the ends of phrases in written drama: essentially helping the play's cast to know when to pause. In particular, they used three different symbols to divide speeches into three lengths, known as commas (indicated by a centred dot), colons (indicated by a dot on the base line), and periods (indicated by a raised dot).

The Romans (circa 1st century BC) also adopted symbols to indicate pauses.

Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of the Christian Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud and the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation, various punctuation marks, and an early version of initial capitals. St Jerome and his colleagues, who produced the Vulgate translation of the Bible into Latin, developed an early system (circa 400 AD); this was considerably improved on by Alcuin. The marks included the virgule (forward slash) and a dots in different locations: centred in the line, raised, or in groups.

The use of punctuation was not standardized until after the invention of printing. Credit for introducing a standard system is generally given to Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They popularized the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, invented the semicolon, made occasional use of parentheses, and created the modern comma by lowering the virgule.

Punctuation English language

The modern system of English punctuation was pretty well in place by 1660, with the full stop, comma, semicolon, colon, dash, apostrophe, exclamation mark, quotation marks and parentheses all in use.

Punctuation Other languages

Other European languages use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that the few variations confuse a naïve English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French, quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. »

In Greek, the question mark is written as a sign resembling the English semi-colon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (·), known as the ano teleia.

Arabic written from right to left uses a reversed question mark: ?.

Originally Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 1600s, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written in the Devanagari script, started using the vertical bar to end a line of a verse and double vertical bars to end the verse.

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean did not use punctuation before the modern era. The grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules.

Further information: East Asian Punctuation Ethiopian languages, including Amharic, Tigrinya, Ge'ez, and Afaan Oromo, make use of these punctuation marks: space (?), comma (?), sentence end (?), semicolon (?), colon (?), preface colon (?), question mark (?), paragraph separator (?).

Novel punctuation marks

A European patent application was filed, and published in 1992 under WO number WO9219458, for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". As of 2006 no patent has been issued for them, though.