文档介绍：Many a people, even by the end of their undergraduate careers, don’t know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon. Punctuation, which is one of the foundations of language, gives language meaning and direction. Lewis Thomas brings this vital ingredient of language to the forefront in the essay “Notes on Punctuation”.
Lewis Thomas (1913-1993), . noted physician, scientist, educator.
“Notes on Punctuation” by Lewis Thomas
from The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979:103-6).
There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under plex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (ma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much plicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops we would have co