What's the point? - An essay on punctuation

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2010 im Fachbereich Englisch - Grammatik, Stil, Arbeitstechnik, Note: 3,0, Universität zu Köln (Philosophische Fakultät), Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: This essay will focus on the use of punctuation and punctuation marks in American and British English writing. As today more and more people seem to not use the right amount of punctuation marks anymore and marks like the semicolon are supposed to have died out I wondered, whether these assumptions of Lynne Truss in her brilliantly written book Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2003) are true or not. In order to test this, a survey was prepared and passed over to twelve former or actual students of English many of whom plan to become a teacher or are already working as teachers; additionally the survey was given to eight people who did not / do not study the English language but learned English at school, went to various places, where English is spoken or at least live in our Americanized world with its various adaptations from the English language. The survey which they had to do and which can be found in the appendix deals with English punctuation but nevertheless was introduced in German, which was chosen in order to avoid problems in understanding the different tasks, which could have distorted the results of the survey. The sentences used in the survey were mostly taken out of books, describing problems of punctuating, so that one can be sure not to make the kind of mistakes one was planning to test others on. In addition to the comparison of the results of the survey from students / non-students of English, also native speakers were asked to complete the survey; the aim of this was to compare the results of second language learners with those of native-speakers and to see, who of these were able to gain a better result. Before the survey and its data are analyzed, the use of punctuation and punctuation marks in general will be considered, but firstly the question what punctuation is and what kind of use it has shall be elaborated upon.