Prior to the 1800s, the majority of grammarians and scholars advocated personal taste and judgment as a guide to punctuating, or “pointing,” a text. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher George Campbell, writing the same year the Declaration of Independence was signed, argued that “language is purely a species of fashion. . . . It is not the business of grammar, as some critics seem preposterously to imagine, to give law to the fashions which regulate our speech.”
