William Marvel: Writing for ADD

To prepare for a recent column involving early constitutional debate, I consulted the Pennsylvania Gazette, which I have on microfilm for the 1770s and 1780s. I often forget how densely prolix writers of the Revolutionary era could be. Their sentences rambled on interminably, with random punctuation and rare paragraph indentations that served less for logical organization than as landmarks for finding one’s place again, after the eyelids fluttered open from a little nap.

At least in handwritten communications, punctuation seemed to vary by region, if the writer was educated enough to use it at all. Literacy had come a long way in the United States by 1860, especially in the North, but it was hardly universal. Civil War soldiers often relied on phonetic spelling in their letters, and many seemed unduly optimistic about the recipient’s ability to decipher the intended structure. Words sometimes ran on continuously, as in ancient Greek, with nothing to mark the end of one thought and the beginning of another.