underpunctuation
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See also: under-punctuation
English[edit]
Alternative forms[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From under- + punctuation.
Noun[edit]
underpunctuation (uncountable)
- Insufficient punctuation.
- 1911 May 11, “The Comma”, in The Daily Missoulian, volume XXXVIII, number 6, Missoula, Mont., page 4:
- The trend of good writing is toward underpunctuation. Or, rather, if writing needs an array of marks, like an assortment of golf clubs, it is a sign that the writer’s method is becoming too involved.
- 1933, J[acob] C[loyd] Tressler, M[arguerite] B[lack] Shelmadine, Junior English in Action, book three, Boston, Mass., New York, N.Y., Chicago, Ill.: D. C. Heath and Company, page 120:
- Overpunctuation is just as bad as underpunctuation. Therefore if you either omit a needed mark or insert a mark that is not needed, the sentence is wrong.
- 1939, W[alter] W[ilbur] Hatfield, Senior English Activities, Boston, Mass., Atlanta, Ga., Dallas, Tex., San Francisco, Calif.: American Book Company, page 277:
- Do you approve this punctuation? Inspect the punctuation of the whole composition. On the whole, is it good? Does the writer err on the side of underpunctuation or overpunctuation?
- 1953 October 29, Miriam Dressler, “Terrific, At Least! Columbia “Jester” Combines Sarcasm And Sex; Shows Humor, Not Subtlety”, in Barnard Bulletin, page 2:
- Main trouble with “The House We Used to Haunt” and “The Wizzard One” is each other. Kids are cute, but somehow five pages of underpunctuation, pseudo-naïve sentence structure, and well-calculated grammatical errors are less than cute.
- 1961 June 14, J. C. W., “Blunder in Crimea”, in The Richmond News Leader, Richmond, Va., page 13:
- The book is enlivened by wry comments (“The East India Company’s commissions implied social inferiority, as they were obtainable by merit only, and not, like the more coveted Queen’s commissions, by purchase”). but it is marred by a Southern Rhodesian system of under[-]punctuation and an almost gloating anti-French bias.
- 2020, Clara Ho-yan Chan, “Challenges in legal translation: a language perspective”, in Legal Translation and Bilingual Law Drafting in Hong Kong: Challenges and Interactions in Chinese Regions, Routledge, section 2 (Europeanisation of legal Chinese), subsection 1 (Legislation), subsubsection 2 (Syntax), subsubsubsection iii (Underpunctuation), page 35:
- Underpunctuation is common practice in the legal genre (Duff 1995: 1109). The following two examples are both more than 40 characters in length and contain no punctuation.