Elements of elocution - 1810 Author:John Walker Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: in Sterne himself; in this case, I say, it may be reckoned among one of the greatest abuses of modern orthography. Sterne's dashing may be called a species of... more » rhetorical punctuation ; but the dash may and ought to be used grammatically, when there is such an order of the words as to induce the reader to run the sense of one member into another, from which it ought to be separated. EXAMPLE. After the Prince of Orange had got possession of the government of England—Scotland and Ireland remained still to be settled. Macfherson't History of England. The punctuation of the eye, and that of the ear, being thus at variance, and the latter being the principal object of this essay, it may not be useless to attempt to give a general idea of the principles of that punctuation which really exists in correct and elegant speaking, but which has hitherto been left entirely to the taste and judgment of the reader.. Theory of Rhetorical Punctuation, It may be observed, that pausing is regulated by- two circumstances ; one is, conveying ideas distinctly by separating such as are distinct, and uniting sucn as are associated ; the other is, forming the words that convey these ideas into such classes, or portions, as may be forcibly and easily pronounced ; tor this reason, when the words, from their signification, require to be distinctly pointed out, that is, to convey objects distinguished from each other, however frequent and numerous the ptoists may be, they arc necessary ; but if words connected in sense, continue to a greater extent than can be easily pronounced together, and at the same time have no such distinct parts as immediately suggest where we ought to pause, the only rule that can be given is, not to separate such words as are more united than those that we do not s...« less