Punctuation Galore

Nicholas Bakers two essays, Survival of the Fittest and Q As In Quotation, are all about punctuation. Q As In Quotation only addresses the use of quotations and Survival of the Fittest is geared towards how punctuation has evolved to what it is today. Baker compares his two topics throughout both essays and has a informative tone as well as a sarcastic one at times.

In Survival of the Fittest, Baker uses a lot of historical facts to explain how we went from using three commas for a pause or how the semi colon came to be. He writes about how writing went form one person to the next and as it went this way, it evolved. It would take elements from the past to come up with new ways of spacing until it reached what we have today. The essay demonstrates how what was going on at the times had an effect on the way people punctuated. For example when Baker mentions Dr. Parkes book, he mentions how he uses the two halves of a semi-linked by an em-dash. Then Baker explains that this might have been so as a way for Parkes to "protest American trends in copy-editing".

Each punctuation mark has a story of its own that can be traced bath to historical figures like the greeks and monks in monasteries, that led it to reach the punctuation we know today. It was because of the continuous changes done to the punctuation marks that they have come to be what they are. This helps explain the title of the essay since it truly is the "Fittest" that survived. It also shows how it was smart of Baker to make allusion to Darwin throughout the essay explaining the "evolution" of punctuation and which "traits" were passed down.

The evolution of punctuation focuses more on punctuation used for pauses but in Q as in Quotation, it is all about quotation marks. Baker talks about the ideas people have of quotation marks and how they are viewed as useful and how they are not. Throughout the essay Baker explains how quotes have to be used the right way so that it doesn't feel like a pause in the flow of what is being written. He personifies quotations as witnesses that gives information and the quotation becomes described as  "nestling into it by way of a difference from the rest of the text". Baker believes that a quotation is not something negative when see with care.. he writes that the author must keep in control and makes sure the quotations has value in what is written. By allowing a quotation to be a part of someones writing it demonstrates : the measure of an individual's willingness to open his internal universe of meaning to dialogue".

All this relates to what we have been looking at in class in the sense that we have been discussing the proper use of quotations and comma splicing. We have also been discussing essays and these two essays along with their content are the mix of everything we have learned being put into practice.