History Main / NoPunctuationPeriod

* One practice of modern poetry is to dispense with punctuation. The most famous example is ee cummings (or E.E. Cummings, depending on who you ask).

* In D&D dwarven language continues little punctuation, just red highlighting for important words and slashes between sentences.

* The fiction of portuguese novelist José Saramago features only periods and commas, and nothing more. Furthermore, there's no indication of dialogue or who's talking what, except that each piece of dialogue starts with capital letters, just as if it was written normally. Finally, his paragraphs extend over pages. Sweden awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature.

** It is specifically to reduce these ambiguities that Hebrew and Arabic have methods of writing vowels at all - the structure of the languages are such that they're pretty much readable without the vowels (mn lngwgs r ctll ths wy t sm dgr), but people came up with vowel "points" (symbols above and below the letters) to eliminate any questions that might arise through this omission. Most non-religious texts still leave them out.

* A somewhat example: the Arabic alphabet contains many pairs or sets of letters which are mostly, or completely, identical except for the placement of dots meant to distinguish them. Originally, these dots weren't there. This meant you often couldn't tell, except by already knowing the words and judging from context, if a given letter was (for example) an F or Q, or in the worst possible case, a B, T, TH, N, or Y.

** [[SuperlativeDubbing Not that you need them.]]

[[AC: {{Anime}} and {{Manga}}]]
* A disturbing trend, in ''{{Naruto}}'' fanfiction at least, is for all punctuation to be correct except for the complete exclusion of periods in speaking sentences, despite periods being everywhere else. Exclamation points and question marks seem to stay in, however.
* The subtitles on the ''SpiritedAway'' DVD are styled similarly to the ''BreathOfFire III'' dialogue mentioned above. Very disorienting.
** [[SuperlativeDubbing Not that you need them.]]
* Given that periods are not required in written Japanese, a lot of scanlations are prone to this. Or else! They will end every sentence the same way! With an exclamation mark! Even when it makes no sense! And when it reduces the impact of sentences that had an exclamation mark in Japanese!

[[AC:{{Theatre}}]]
* In ''Wonderful Town'', a character has to take an emergency pause for breath while reading an enormous run-on sentence in one of the [[StylisticSuck deliberately ridiculous]] [[ShowWithinAShow Plays Within The Play]].

[[AC:{{Comics}}]]
* A rather unique characteristic of comic books from the SilverAge and forward, particularly those from DC, is a complete lack of any punctuation other than exclamation points and question marks. In the beginning it was because the low-quality paper stock would render any small marks, like periods or commas, invisible or illegible. As it stands, the omission of periods and the use of all caps is a stylistic choice, not practiced by all letterers. The dialog is instead structured by comic's own unique punctuation mark, the speech balloon, which provides flow and rhythm via spacial placement, as well as other tone information.
* The speech balloons in ''{{Garfield}}'' ''never'' end with a period. They end only with an exclamation point, question mark, or a hyphen or dash to indicate interruption. Sentences that do not terminate with the end of a speech balloon would have normal punctuation.

*** For those who want a bit more concrete an example: [[TheBible The New Testament]] is, in fact, one of the ''best'' preserved manuscripts -- many copies and fragments of copies have survived, and most of the oldest ones have surfaced in the last century. On a collated text -- one created by combining every copy available -- it is pretty much impossible to find a page where there isn't anything footnoted with an explanation of why they chose the version they did & what the variants were, in space-saving standardized code. (And this is also a text that was usually proofread, as evidenced by some copies having corrections; apparently it was suspected that God might be a GrammarNazi.)

so youve found what seems to be a good {{fan fic}} i mean you havent started reading it yet but its got a good description and better yet your {{OTP}} is in it of course you have to read it thusly you click on it and beg

wait um what is this where are the periods the question marks exclamation points oh god no commas or colons no no [[BigNo NOOOOOOOOoooooo]]

alas youve just stumbled into a relic of the {{no punctuation period}} a horrible time in which people apparently forgot how sentences are built

taken to extremes it can result in a visual {{wall of text}} thus adding to its unreadableness

sadly this happens outside of fan fics too as many tropers could tell you there are few havens of good style [[GrammarNazi some brave netizens tropers among them]] have taken up arms to fight back the [[SeriousBusiness scourge of illiteracy]]

often goes hand in hand with [[AllLowercaseLetters all lowercase letters]] although more often uppercase letters will be used but only in a limited capacity like for character names acronyms and SHOUTING

has absolutely nothing to do with [[NoPeriodsPeriod that thing]] or [[ZeroPunctuation that other thing]] let us mention neither here related WantonCrueltyToTheCommonComma

* A somewhat example: the Arabic alphabet contains many pairs or sets of letters which are mostly, or completely, identical except for the placement of dots meant to distinguish them. Originally, these dots weren't there. This meant you often couldn't tell, except by already knowing the words and judging from context, if a given letter was (for example) an F or K, or in the worst possible case, a B, T, TH, N, or Y.

** Dave Strider and Aradia Megido types with no punctuation, but splits the text up so a period equals a new line.
** Nepeta Leijon and Terezi Pyrope only uses exclamation and question marks.

* The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros never, ever seems to use quotation marks. You have to figure out whose talking and if there even is talking and its just a pain to do for English.

alas youve just stumbled into a {{no punctuation period}} a horrible time in which people apparently forgot how sentences are built

* There's an early 19th-century satirical work by Lord Timothy Dexter called "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones", which was at one point published without punctuation ("stops"), and had all of the missing marks in an appendix, with a note about how readers could sprinkle them through the text as they desired. The first editions didn't have the punctuation page; it was added as a TakeThat in later ones.

often goes hand in hand with [[AllLowercaseLetters all lowercase letters]]

* Dave Strider of ''{{Homestuck}}'' fame types like this. The {{troll}}s grimAuxiliatrix and gallowsCalibrator use no punctuation marks, but GA capitalizes the first letter of every word, and GC uses leetspeak.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/punct_1281.jpg

*** You know how the King James Bible has a whole load of words in ''italics,'' seemingly at random? [[http://www.biblebelievers.com/jmelton/italics.html Those are all words that the translators put in to make it easier to read in English.]] If you follow that link, you can see how adding these words explicitly endorses one of a range of possible readings of the original text, SoYeah.