Which punctuation mark do you think is used most often in a story? Is it a full stop or a comma? Which would you logically expect to see more of? And is each story written accordingly?
I bought the book I had to read for the book club and rushed to meet my friend without even opening it. Once I had caught my breath, the subject came up, he asked to see the book and I handed it to him.
He was surprised! The spaces between the sentences were not like in any novel, they were like in the books you read in primary school. You know, the kind that make reading easier and don't make the page look so full. When I picked it up and looked at it, I thought it might have something to do with the publisher, but I also shared his surprise.
Then I noticed a few sentences, then a few more. There were commas at the end of dialogues, and the sentence was incomplete. I thought it was an unfamiliar usage, so I looked more closely.
When I checked, I saw that it was the same everywhere. I couldn't make sense of it because there were commas literally everywhere. On the other hand, there was no sign of the full stops I needed to see.
We laughed and turned the situation into a game and started looking for the full stops. When we found a few, we wondered what was different about the sentence. No, it was a normal sentence. Then why was there a comma where there should have been a full stop?
Photo by Teslariu Mihai on Unsplash
I knew nothing about the author except that he was a Nobel Prize winner for literature and that he was Norwegian. I had read that he was a well-known figure in Scandinavian literature. I had no idea about the subject of the book or his writing style, so I chose it out of curiosity to read for my book club.
Throughout this article I will not mention anything that might spoil the work. I have not finished the book, so instead of giving a positive/negative verdict, I will discuss why he might have gone down this path.
Although I have nothing to add about the content of the novel, I must point out that the Nobel Prizes are not as meaningful as they used to be. Moreover, a prize awarded to Norway by the committee of Sweden, another Scandinavian country, will always remain dubious in the eyes of the majority. If you want to read more about the Nobel Prize and why I am so suspicious, please read my article.
Back to punctuation. I had previously bought the book and also acquired it digitally so that I could send it to friends who did not have access to it, so even though I had not yet read it, I had everything I needed to do what I wanted.
I imported this novel of approximately 16,000 words into a Word file and edited some parts. Then I saved all the commas, full stops, question marks and exclamations. The result will be incredible to those who have not read the book and only partially understandable to those who have.
Now think about the question at the beginning and give an answer. What do you think is the ratio between the use of commas and the use of full stops? Maybe it is almost the same, or maybe commas are used two or three times more often than full stops. What do you think? I am not going to give you the answer right now because I am going to do another addition.
To make sense of the result, a comparison will be necessary. I had no other digital file of 16,000 words. So I thought it would be appropriate to look at the works of Edgar Allan Poe that we were reading this month for the other book club. They were short stories, of course. By adding one more to the five stories we read, I more or less evened out that number.
For those who are curious, the stories I discussed were as follows: “The Black Cat”, “Metzengerstein”, “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether”, “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, “The Appointment” and additionally “Berenice”.
Then I did the same with the short stories, making notes and observing the proportions in them, so that I could make a comparison. I put the sum of Poe's six stories and Jon Fosse's “Morning and Evening” side by side. I used all the stories in Turkish to check.
Here you go, last chance to guess!
Comparison of Fosse and Poe punctuation based on a total of approximately 16000 words of content - Image by Author
Yes, Fosse used a total of almost 4000 commas and 32 full stops in this work. If your answer was 120 times, then you are the winner. On the other hand, in Poe's six stories, the full stops dominate, but the commas are not exaggeratedly few.
To be honest, when I wrote this article, my answer was in favour of the commas. (Only the last two of the six stories use commas slightly more than full stops)
I think the other strange aspect is the use of exclamation marks and question marks, which we did not think about at the beginning. We see that the question mark remains at a reasonable level. However, the same cannot be said for the exclamation mark. Taking into account the margin of error in the statistics (which I estimate to be low), there may have been a maximum of three to five exclamation marks (due to possible formatting problems in the transfer between files). This, of course, does not change the result. Either Poe wanted to emphasise the emotions or Fosse wanted a completely calm narration.
Also, let's not forget that I'm looking at six different stories, as opposed to one novel (narration of a single plot), so factors such as changing theme, character, plot will definitely affect this.
Now let us consider what we can infer from the little information we have. Whether it's true or not, we can make all sorts of assumptions. But first, let us remember our main characters.
The full stop ends the sentence and tells us to take a breath and pause that our connection with the sentence. We start the next sentence with a little pause that we give ourselves and somehow finish it. We read with the continuity of this process throughout the story.
But a comma, although it feels like a full stop, is a completely different mark. It does not give us the space to take a deep breath, it does not want us to get confused. It is an inspector that ensures continuity in the same sentence. Sometimes it counts our shopping list for us, and sometimes it prevents the meaning of the sentence from deteriorating. Although is not as regular as the comma, but it is as disciplined and versatile as the comma.
Perhaps Fosse fell in love with this aspect of the comma, who knows? He was bored with the conventionality and stasis of the comma and wanted to play with it. What I wondered was whether he continued this style in his other stories. When I searched by juxtaposing his name and the comma, I quickly realised that he had. The preference for reducing the use of full stops may also depend on the linguistic structure of Norwegian, I don't know. Since I didn't look at the information in that language, it's important to remember that the results may change depending on the context. However, Fosse either wanted to leave his mark on history or be innovative. Do you think this could be one of the factors that influenced him to win the Nobel Prize?
Poe seems to have followed a balanced path. Maybe he was surprised a lot, got angry, shouted his love, made a fuss somewhere, or suppressed a lot of shushing while silencing his characters. I wonder if the expression of emotion was more necessary in those times? Or was it a sign often favoured in Gothic literature? Did his silence and gloominess, combined with romanticism, give rise to unexpected exclamations? Did he use these marks to reveal what he was hiding in his stories?
Can all these differences in usage give us clues to the personalities of the writers?
Punctuation marks in 1600+ words text - Image by Author
Some of you may be wondering why I have not dealt with apostrophes, quotation marks, hyphens, colons, semicolons, ellipses and parentheses.
The use of apostrophes can vary depending on the original language and the translation of the work. Quotation marks vary depending on how the dialogue is used. Hyphens can also make a difference in the way words are used in different languages and in the way sentences move down to the next line. Colons, semicolons, ellipses and parentheses are generally not used much. With these thoughts in mind, I have avoided going into too much detail, and frankly, I have not found the latter to be necessary.
I know that my friends with programming skills can handle such a project. If you do, I would suggest that you consider the original language of the novels, or all of them in just one language.
I am sure that with a comprehensive study we will be able to find answers to some of our questions and make more accurate predictions.
I will see how enjoyable Fosse's unusual narrative is when I read it and listen to my friends, but the fact is that I felt the need to prepare this book because of his different style. Because I wondered! I wanted to see if we could look at literature from a mathematical point of view.
Poe wrote the poem "The Raven" using both his logic and his emotions. Perhaps we can see this spontaneous face of literature in the frequency of the use of punctuation.
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