The archaeology of punctuation

This week I've been editing Genehunter, and one of the irritating things I've found in  the manuscript is a sprinkling of commas in inappropriate places.  Some of them left me scratching my head, wondering why on Earth I thought a comma was needed in that place.

That got me thinking about the development of punctuation in my writing.  I've been churning out work for over forty years, and there's a lot of it to examine.  It sent me on an archeological dig of my manuscripts, looking at the way my punctuation has evolved over the years.

Twenty years ago I wrote in long sentences punctuated by semi-colons.  An early draft of my novel Snowbird was full of them.  I think semi-colons were used far more then than they are today, but even so this manuscript looked like I have a semi-colon fetish.  I'd obviously been using them as a stylistic device, one that didn't really work.

And then there was my habit of putting my character's internal dialogue into italics.  Looking back on it now, it seems so irritating.  And when I needed italics to indicate telepathic speech between characters that forced me to re-write to get rid of the italic thoughts.  

After that, the next  thing I inflicted on that poor novel was a rash of short, sharp, sentences.  The text now reads like a staccato machine-gun burst rather than flowing prose.  This was a case where I needed more commas, to link up short sentences that jar on the ear.  But that's an editing project for later.  At present I'm working on Genehunter and Auroradawn, and aiming to submit both of these towards the end of the year.

I went from there to what I call my minimal punctuation period.  In this I have some work with a total absence of commas in my sentences.  They read okay, but there's an absence of flow to the work.  After all, there's a limit to how long a sentence can be before it needs a pause.

So now I'm plucking out stray commas that don't belong, and wondering what my next punctuation fetish will be.  It'll be interesting to come back in another ten years' time and see how my writing, and punctuation, have changed again.