Some of us working in schools were perhaps a little disturbed to hear recently that our students now consider the full stop to be a rather cold way of ending a message.
This news inevitably led to more media hammering of the so-called “snowflake generation”.
For what it’s worth, however, I am on the side of youth on this one. Perhaps the time has come for us all to give the full stop the big heave. What has it ever done for anyone?
The clue is surely in the name. If there really is a “blob” blocking the educational road ahead, then this is surely it. In this age of wild swimming, free running and Sainsbury’s free-delivery deals, the dreary old full stop increasingly comes across as a mere obstruction, a complete anachronism.
The loss of narrative flow
Why bother teaching it? It’s an unnatural extra for children to learn, as illustrated by their rarely seeing the need to use one in their early days of extended writing. In that wonderful first phase of literary creation, the novice’s narrative flows freely and rapidly from one thought to the next, a glorious mountain brook, babbling joyously in the morning sunlight. Not a single full stop in sight.
It is only because some teacher or parent then repeatedly responds with a drearily sardonic “perhaps the odd full stop might be in order?” that the child reluctantly begins to conform. The early natural flow is lost.
A passage without full stops still makes complete sense. There is none of the usual tedious stopping and starting, and writers can just get on with what they want to say. On the rare occasions when there really is a need to bring a complete end to something (without simply starting a new line), then why not just leave a slightly bigger space between one word and the next?
Literary precedent
I am not suggesting anything new here. One of the most highly regarded novels written in the English language - James Joyce’s Ulysses - contains page after page where the full stop takes an extended holiday without the reader much noticing.
Similarly, the recent joint Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo wrote Girl, Woman, Other with sparing use of it. And Beckett, Proust and many others have similarly demonstrated that a writer can communicate perfectly well - and sometimes better - without it.
The writing is surely on the wall for the full stop. It is rightly being marginalised by young social-media communicators, and it has been good to see it largely disappear from spoken English too - particularly from schools.
“Why does he keep adding ‘period’?”
I used to know teaching colleagues who, borrowing a rhetorical device commonly used by finger-jabbing American politicians, would end some of their pronouncements with an emphatic “period!”.
I knew that they meant “full stop”, but for me it always seemed a risky and unnecessary departure when communicating with adolescents. “You are not allowed in that room, period!”, “You need to wear the correct school uniform, period!”
“Why does he keep adding ‘period’?” mystified students would quietly ask each other. “Some nervous tic, perhaps?”
Full stops, periods, end-ofs - whatever you want to call them, we need to break free of them.
Sooner or later, we all eventually face that one final full stop - a thought that is probably passing through many a teacher’s mind as we now tread our cautious way through corridors and classrooms. That one final punctuation mark is surely enough for any of us?
And yes, I could have tried to demonstrate the argument by not using any full stops in this piece, but - let’s face it - if there’s one thing worse than a full stop, then it’s a smartarse. Besides, a few winking emoji might be more in order, anyway.
Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire
