Week 3: Storytelling- Ease of reading

Who would have ever thought that all the punctuation and grammar rules that we all learned in lower school would actually be so important? Periods, commas, capitalization and spaces between letters make all the difference in the world. Yet, some of them are more important, or make it easier to read, than others. I read twelve jokes, and by far the most difficult ones to read were the ones without spaces between the words, but why is this?

Without the clear distinction between words, I had to work a lot harder to determine when certain words ended and other words began. This slowed me down considerably. Interestingly, capitalization made little difference so long as it was all lower-case or all upper-case. However, when upper-case letters were used to make the beginning of a sentence apparent, the difference was significant.

After spaces between words, the next most important piece of writing "technology" was definitely punctuation: periods and commas. These devices help give the reading a sense of flow and rhythm, providing natural stopping points and pauses that are essential for ease of reading. Again, however, these periods and commas offer little help without the blessed spaces between words that we all take for granted.

All of these writing devices are tools that we all, at least until we try to read without them, take for granted. So how did the originators of written language go so long without something as basic as spaces between words. How could a language as sophisticated as Latin have been read without punctuation? Obviously they didn't know any better, but still, you would think that they would've come up with these devices so much sooner.

(Example of Ancient Latin, Wikipedia)

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Maybe next week, I'll come up with my own type of punctuation!