Team Partners Telecommunications

What’s the Cost of a Comma?

Posted on Oct 10, 2018

You might not agree, but the real nightmare of All Hallow’s Eve is the fact that it heralds the return of winter. There are those amongst us who would agree with the ancient Celts, whose festival of Samhain was handily appropriated by early Christians, that winter is a time of death, but let’s not go there. Let’s instead consider another type of nightmare, when your business communications go completely wrong.

Being a Telecoms blog you’ll probably be expecting something to do with systems failures, but regular readers will know better than that. In this blog we’re actually going to look at business communications in terms of the unspoken word, in other words letters (remember them?) and how much we rely on punctuation to convey meaning. And before you decide to go no further, don’t give up. This is good stuff!

The snag with written words is that the only way you get to hear them is in your own head and so you can add any inflexion or tone to those words you choose. All that can be added to those words to help the reader make sense of the meaning so that this isn’t lost is punctuation, but then, how many of us really understand the nuances of this?

Take this sentence. I love you. Now, you’d have thought that was pretty clear, but what happens if you add a question mark to the end? Now it’s “I love you?” with that question mark causing you to raise your tone on the last word to reflect the meaning that the speaker is incredulous at his own love of whomever he / she is talking to. Add a comma and it changes again becoming “I, love you?” now it’s a challenge and the poor soul at the receiving end has obviously made a sad misjudgement and is being excoriated for it. You see how important punctuation is? That’s why lawyers tend to avoid it. They know that punctuation can give meaning that was never intended.

There’s a cracking story about this when, some years ago a telecoms company (handily) in the States was forced to pay an extra $2.13m to use telegraph poles belonging to another company because an extra comma added to the contract between them allowed for that contract to be cancelled. Have a look at the paragraph that made all the difference:

“This agreement shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one-year prior notice in writing by either party”

What do you reckon? That the contract is firm for five years and then for another five years? Not a bit of it. That first comma allows cancellation at any point. Obviously the whole thing went to court, but the ruling was clear, it was that “Based on the rules of punctuation the comma in question allows for the termination of the contract at any time, without cause, upon one year’s written notice.”

So, punctuation really is important!

Next month we’ll look at the spoken word, starting with an oft (and wrongly) quoted statistic derived from Professor Albert Mehrabian of the University of of California, Los Angeles that when listening to someone talking only 7% of the mean is conveyed by the words themselves. It’s absolutely not true.