It is a sobering thought that often the decision as to whether a party can extricate themselves from an undesirable agreement may rest on thoughtless punctuation. A liberal smattering of commas, as we lawyers are aware, can cause all sorts of problems and can go a long way to clouding the parties intentions as to when an agreement was to be terminated. Of course it depends which side you are representing - sometimes a peppering of bad punctuation can be the saving grace!
Maligned though it may be, punctuation can affect the meaning of an English sentence drastically, and accordingly can skew the intended meaning of a clause in an agreement substantially.
This was all brought home to us recently in a seminar hosted by Marion Smith of Quadrant chambers held at DLA Piper's offices which focused on terminating commercial agreements.
Is the answer then to use no punctuation at all or as little as possible? Does this really circumvent all confusion? It seems to me that taking the easy way out and declining to use any punctuation at all does not really clarify matters but is often preferable to a devil may care attitude to the use of commas or just being unsure as to where they should be inserted. Incidentally it makes sentences like the latter rather difficult to read.
The power of the comma was all too clearly shown by adding punctuation to the following sentence "A woman without her man is nothing". There can be no clearer illustration of the impact of a few innocent looking pieces of punctuation. Consider this. "A woman: without her, man is nothing". And so it is that with one colon and an innocent looking comma the meaning of the phrase has been turned on its head. But which is right? Well that's another blog altogether………..