IMPORTANCE OF PUNCTUATIONS IN LEGAL WRITING

Subject: 1.5: Law and Language

Academic Year: 2022-2023

Semester: I

Submitted by

DISHA BAIS

UID : UG2022- 37

Submitted to

Dr. Shivender Rahul

(Assistant Professor of English)

MAHARASHTRA NATIONAL LAW UNIVERSITY, NAGPUR

ABSTRACT
Punctuation marks are such an indispensable part of language and its daily usage that
it often gets brushed aside. This notion has not been given enough attention and thus
its implications linger in the present, not just in our daily lives but in the legal realm. It
is essential for a person from the legal fraternity to appreciate the correct usage of
punctuation marks. Punctuation is perhaps one of the most abused elements of writing
in general – from professional and scientific writing, to creative and legal writing.
Diction, word placement and sentence structure seem to rule the world of writing,
while the value of precise punctuation seems to slip through the cracks. The correct
usage of pronunciation would strive to elevate the quality of the legal document.
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
1. To understand the importance of usage of correct pronunciation in day to day
life
2. To comprehend the essence of punctuations in legal writing
3. To learn various pointers to improve one’s usage of pronunciation marks in the
realm of legal writing

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
(to be written in the final submission)
INTRODUCTION
“The semicolon has become so hateful to me,” confessed Paul Robinson in a 2002
essay, “that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.” When Robinson, a
humanities professor at Stanford University, sees a dot balanced over a comma, he is
filled with hate and “exasperation.” Robinson is perhaps the semicolon’s most devoted
foe, but he is hardly its only modern detractor. A host of novelists, from George
Orwell to Donald Barthelme, have discoursed on its ugliness, or irrelevance, or both.
Kurt Vonnegut was unequivocal in his last book, advising writers, “Do not use
semicolons. All they do is show you’ve been to college.
To ask such a question might seem to put too fine a point on points: What profit can
there be in mulling over punctuation, and in particular its history, when we have
copyeditors and stylebooks to set straight our misplaced colons and commas?1
The appropriate use of punctuation marks is one of the first grammar rules we are
taught. Their use adheres to the conventions outlined in the style manuals that specify
how punctuation should be used in formal texts. However, most people employ
punctuation more flexibly when writing in general. Many of the prescribed rules are
omitted, substituted, improvised, and changed. the application Punctuation is
frequently taken for granted as a result of this informal approach2.
The majority of punctuation is designed to be seen rather than heard. The metre that
establishes the measure within the silent voice of typography, these modest, frequently
understated mechanisms are very significant. Tempo, pitch, volume, and word
separation are all controlled by punctuation. Periods indicate complete stops. Commas
make reading slower.

1
Cecelia Watson, “Points of Contention: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Punctuation” The
University of Chicago Press Journals, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp 649.
2
Urban A. Lavery, “punctuation in the law”, American Bar Association Journal, APRIL, 1923, Vol. 9, No.
4 (APRIL, 1923), pp. 225.
THE IMPACT OF PUNCTUATION
Punctuation started out as free and easy prosodic units, meant to help the reader read
out loud to an audience with all the requisite intonation, tone, pitch and pauses
intended by an absent author. Punctuation, in a sense, reminds you that language is
really spoken, even if it’s written. Learning to put the right punctuation in the right
place among all the written words thus becomes less about speech and cadence and
more about a display of literacy and prestige. Punctuation became marks of good
grammar.
There is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation
marks. The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic
cadence. Exclamation points are like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like
musical upbeats, colons dominant seventh chords; and only a person who can perceive
the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form can really feel the
distinction between the comma and the semicolon. But perhaps the idiosyncratic
opposition to punctuation marks that arose in the early part of this century, an
opposition from which no observant person can completely dissociate himself, is not
so much a revolt against an ornamental element as it is the expression of how sharply
music and language diverge from one another. But it can hardly be considered an
accident that music's contact with the punctuation marks in language was bound up
with the schema of tonality, which has since disintegrated, and that the efforts of
modern music could easily be described as an attempt to create punctuation marks
without tonality. But if music is forced to preserve the image of its resemblance to
language in punctuation marks, then language may give in to its re- semblance to mury
soft Symbols in music perform comparable functions3.
Punctuation marks need not be considered only in relation to texts in which they are an
obvious part of the design. The sensitive application of punctuation in even the most
commonplace unit changes the entire feeling of a design
Topography is another area where punctuations add to its beauty and creativity,
punctuation is to typography what perspective is to painting. It introduces the illusion
of visual and audible dimension, giving words vitality. Whether prominent or subtle,
punctuation marks are the heartbeat of typography, moving words along in proper
timing and with proper emphasis4.
Thus it can be said that the less punctuation marks, taken in isolation, convey meaning
or expression and the more they constitute the opposite pole in language to names, the
more each of them acquires a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an expression
3
Theodor W. Adorno and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, “Punctuation Marks” The Antioch Review ,
Summer, 1990, Vol. 48, No. 3, Poetry Today (Summer, 1990), pp. 301.
4
Urban A. Lavery, “punctuation in the law”, American Bar Association Journal, APRIL, 1923, Vol. 9, No.
4 (APRIL, 1923), pp. 229
of its own, which cannot be separated from its syntactic function but is by no means
exhausted.
PUNCTUATION IN THE LAW
“what is good punctuation in other writing is usually over punctuation from the
lawyer's point of view”
One the most famous maxims of the law? "De minimis non curat Lex”? Is to the effect
that the law does not concern itself with trifles. For the average lawyer punctuation is
purely a "de minimis" matter, a trifle to which he gives no concern.
A good illustration of this difference occurred in the work of the Illinois Constitutional
Convention, that body gave much more than usual consideration to matters of
draftsmanship and the subject of punctuation received careful and thoughtful attention.
After the final draft of the document had been prepared and a fixed policy of reducing
punctuation to a minimum had been adopted the draft was sent for criticism as to style
and form to a well-known professor of English in a leading university. That expert on
style made scarcely any corrections as to the wording of the draft but he inserted a
multitude of "points" (the technical name for punctuation marks), especially of
commas. Practically every point which he inserted, however, was removed before the
document was engrossed. Those in charge of the actual drafting of the document had
many a good laugh about "the barrel of commas for sale," when the extra points were
removed. Yet the English professor was entirely right from his point of view. He was
schooled in a tradition which held and taught the so-called close style of punctuation,
while every good lawyer adheres rigidly to the open style5.
Punctuation is also an important factor in the every-day business of the lawyer. Here
likewise there are no settled rules or principles which lawyers adopt, although there is
serious need for just that thing. The practice in regard to punctuation usage has swayed
from one extreme to another and going back towards the earlier custom. A century ago
it was the common practice to omit all points from a deed or other instrument because
it was considered dangerous to insert them.
It is well known that draftsmen of legal instruments frequently ignore all the rules on
that subject (punctuation) to which grammarians and rhetoricians attach great
importance. The most learned and accomplished lawyers often times pay but little
attention to it in their preparation of legal instruments. This may be because the
copyist or the writer to whom the paper is dictated has not followed the directions or
intonations of the author or it may be because it is known that the cases are few that
are determined by punctuation.
Most lawyers, however, are reckless in their use of points and as a result the books are
full of cases which turn on nothing but questions of punctuation. In Bouvier's Law
Dictionary, in Corpus Juris and in fact in every law digest, there will be found many
cases which involve nothing but careless attention to punctuation in the preparation of

5
ibid
legal documents. In one of the compilations of leading cases there appears an extended
note on "Punctuation as affecting Construction of Contracts" in which more than thirty
important cases are digested and many other cases cited.
Where punctuation is necessary there is ordinarily little difficulty with the period, the
colon and the semicolon; the rules governing these points being fairly scientific and
pretty well understood. The question mark, the exclamation mark and the points for
quotation give little trouble, each of them having, generally, a definite and limited
purpose. Moreover, the writer does not usually have the option of using them or not,
as he frequently does, say with the comma. The colon it should be said is gradually
disappearing from use while the question mark and the exclamation point practically
never are used by the drafts man. Of these points therefore the period and the
semicolon remain and with a little horse sense they can be used without trouble.
CONCLUSION
In the end we come back to where we started out. "De minimis non curat lex" is an
excellent gospel for the lawyer to follow. But the trouble is one cannot always say
what are the little things. In the art of writing, just as in every other art, it is the details,
the lights and shadows of the picture, the shades of meaning in a sentence, which mark
the work of the true artist from that of the fumbler. It would be easy indeed to
overemphasize the importance of punctuation to the practicing lawyer and yet it seems
fair to say the subject has been underemphasized in the past.