Amy Einsohn: Conventions, fashions, and style

It's just like me to strike a blow for punctuation relativity. In any case, Amy Einsohn is good on changing fashions in punctuation.

Amy Einsohn, The Copyeditor's Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communication (University of California Press, 2000), 72-73.

Conventions, Fashions, and Style

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English authors tended to be profligate in scattering commas and semicolons; their style is now called *close punctuation.* The contemporary preference, however, is to use as few commas and semicolons as possible, a style called *open punctuation.* ...
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Within the realm of open punctuation, some choices, particularly those related to the comma, are more subjective than objective. Some writers, for example, *hear* punctuation, and they use commas, semicolons, and colons to speed or slow the pace and rhythm of their prose. Aural punctuators tend to hear a comma as a one-beat pause, a semicolon as a two-beat pause, and a period as a three- or four-beat pause. Some also hear a colon as a pause; for others, a colon signals a sharp accelerando, a signal to speed ahead because something important is coming.

A second group of writers have a highly visual sense of punctuation, and they are most concerned about how their sentences look on the page, aiming for sentences that are not overly cluttered by punctuation yet not so sparsely punctuated as to look neglected or to be confusing.

A third approach — and the one taken by all the editorial style manuals — is to punctuate according to grammatical and syntactical units. The advantage of this method is that it does not rely on the ear or eye of the writer or copyeditor, and therefore tends to be less subjective. In a given sentence, the question that syntactical punctuators ask regarding the presence or absence of commas is not "Do you hear a pause here?" or "Does this look too choppy?" but "Is this an introductory adverbial phrase?"

You will also encounter writers who regard punctuation as an esoteric art and freely combine the aural, visual, and syntactical methods. Most of the idosyncratic punctuators take a wing-and-a-prayer approach and will be pleased by your imposition of order and reasonableness. A few, however, will defend to the death their eccentric ways, proclaiming that the First Amendment guarantees their freedom to punctuate without editorial interference.

When copyediting nonliterary texts, corporate documents, and scientific or technical reports, you can confidently apply the conventions set forth in your style manual. But if your author is an experienced literary or professional writer, you will want to interpret some of the conventions more liberally. Writers who care about punctuation may become quite upset if a copyeditor imposes conventions that are at odds with their own sense of cadence, appearance, or taste.