Underpunctuation

The trend of good writing is toward underpunctuation. Or, rather, if writing needs an array of marks, like an assortment of golf clubs, it is a sign that the writer’s method is becoming too involved.

Overpunctuation is just as bad as underpunctuation. Therefore if you either omit a needed mark or insert a mark that is not needed, the sentence is wrong.

Do you approve this punctuation? Inspect the punctuation of the whole composition. On the whole, is it good? Does the writer err on the side of underpunctuation or overpunctuation?

Main trouble with “The House We Used to Haunt” and “The Wizzard One” is each other. Kids are cute, but somehow five pages of underpunctuation, pseudo-naïve sentence structure, and well-calculated grammatical errors are less than cute.

The book is enlivened by wry comments (“The East India Company’s commissions implied social inferiority, as they were obtainable by merit only, and not, like the more coveted Queen’s commissions, by purchase”). but it is marred by a Southern Rhodesian system of under[-]punctuation and an almost gloating anti-French bias.

Underpunctuation is common practice in the legal genre (Duff 1995: 1109). The following two examples are both more than 40 characters in length and contain no punctuation.