DOUBTFUL MODIFIERS
Perhaps more obscurity in language, often resulting in hurtful misunderstandings and expensive litigation, grows out of doubtful modifiers than out of any other source of bad construction. A knowledge of punctuation here serves a very useful purpose, not always by putting the proper mark in the proper place, but generally by showing the writer the necessity of recasting his sentence, thus removing the cause of any possible wrong interpretation. Punctuation points out the danger; the writer removes it.
What did Smith write according to the wording and punctuation of the following sentence?
81. Smith wrote part of the preface and Chapter I.
It says clearly that Smith wrote part of the preface and part of Chapter I.
And what does the next sentence say he wrote?
81-1. Smith wrote part of the preface, and Chapter I.
It says that Smith wrote part of the preface, and all of Chapter I.
It is not wise to make the meaning of language, especially in important matters, depend upon a mode of punctuation little understood. The wise way is to recast the language. Legal phraseology grew out of the difficulty of so writing as to make one’s meaning unmistakable; but it went to the extreme in verbiage, and has become distasteful even to lawyers. Such verbiage is not necessary to express one’s meaning.
Our next sentence is particularly informing to us in our efforts to establish two or three fundamental principles governing the use of all marks:
82. Life may be held so pure, so receptive to all high influence, so noble in its aspirations, as to furnish the right conditions for these finer promptings; or it may so degenerate into the material, the selfish, the self-centered, as to become deaf and blind and unresponsive to them.
The comma after “aspirations” is used to disconnect the two groups of words between which it stands, thus breaking up an apparent group (so noble in its aspirations as to furnish the right conditions for these finer promptings), and forming out of it two groups, each of which begins with “so,” each group having for its complement the group beginning with “as.”
We perhaps may not say that the comma after “aspirations” at once gives notice of the relation of each of the preceding groups to what follows; but, when the comma cuts “as” off from the preceding “so,” it shows that “as” introduces a group completing each of the preceding groups introduced by “so.” This disconnection between the last two groups compels the reader to make the new grouping.
In the second of the larger groups of this sentence occurs a somewhat similar grouping made by “so—as.” Here the comma is used, just as it is used in Sentence 80, to mark the end of the first part of the group. Its use in both clauses may be said to follow the punctuation diagrammatically exhibited in Sentence 3-2. In No. 82 the reader suspends the thought partially expressed by “so pure” until he reaches the complementary group of words beginning with “as.” This process of suspending the thought occurs in this clause after each group introduced by “so.” The process, instead of being difficult, is well-nigh intuitive, for “so” naturally raises the expectation of the correlative “as,” which introduces the complement of each group introduced by “so.”
Let us also note the last grouping in this sentence, where “to them” is tied to each of the three preceding adjectives by the grouping ands, thus requiring no mark after the last adjective.