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We may consider our life to be an endless stream of experiences, which run into each other. Some of us are unable to differentiate between these events, in terms of their impact, quality, consequences or possible sterility. And so life takes on a meaningless air, and compounds a feeling of futility and lack of direction. Alternatively, some of us put tremendous meaning on the smallest of things, which can lend an air of hysteria and manic uptime.

So how can we tone down, or vamp up the story of our lives? Well it could all be down to how we punctuate.

Punctuation gives meaning to our lives. In a body of text, punctuation indicates where the reader draws breath, becomes excited or quizzical; turns to a new thought, considers something of lesser importance and even comes to the final ending. So it is with our lives. If you were to look at significant moments in your life, where are question marks, exclamation marks, full stops, commas, brackets, hyphens and dot dot dots? Take a time line/life line and go from - let's indulge in some wackiness - from pre conception, conception, womb, birth through to the present day: and hey, why not beyond. Demarcate your journey simply by the punctuation you select.

Once you have plotted your life in this way, take a moment to look at your 'sentence' and notice your response. Now you can choose to play with it. What would happen if you replaced the question marks and exclamation marks merely with full stops. Or the full stops with colons? Or put in full stops instead of commas and dot dot dots? We had an English teacher, Mr. Miller, who would rant against the use of "hysterical punctuation"!!! He would definitely approve of this suggestion.

Not only does this approach offer us a very simple model for self modelling, it also underlines its more significant application in the process of Modelling.

A modeller is gathering her data from her exemplars. The more data she gathers, the greater will be the possibility of detecting significant similarities and differences - until ultimately there is no news of difference. So using whatever model - be it David Gordon's Template, Robert Dilt's Neuro-Logical Levels, John McWhirter's DBM frameworks, James Lawley and Penny Tompkins' Symbolic Modelling process, or any others that she finds useful, the time will come when she has to aggregate this data in such ways as to generate meaning and distil the inherent structure. Out of the connections she makes, comes the Model to be tested.

This Scoping phase, to use John McWhirter's nomenclature, requires Punctuation.

Consider the following, which are highlighted in Lynne Truss's fantastic book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and notice how critical punctuation is to the meaning and therefore our response to a structure.

Am I looking at my dinner or the dogs? Am I looking at my dinner or the dog's?

Giant Kid's Playground Comment - is this a scary place?

Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off.

A woman, without her man, is nothing. A woman: without her, man is nothing.

He shot himself as a child. He shot, himself, as a child.

Lynne Truss goes on to demonstrate the political significance that can arise from differences of punctuation, using illustration from within the Bible, which have led to radical differences in interpretation and therefore practising ideology

· "Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise." "Verily, I say unto thee this day. Thou shalt be with me in Paradise." · "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord." "The voice of him that crieth. In the wilderness prepare ye the way of the Lord."

The modeller provides the punctuation - to give meaning to the data. It is a blank canvas until the modeller puts in the range of commas, full stops and exclamation marks. And it is worth keeping in the front of the mind, that there are options for interpretation, and so be prepared to re-punctuate. It certainly is a place to return to when, after testing the model and finding that it doesn't generate the same behavioural results.

In the world of editorial judgement, there are different rules advocated and often fought over vehemently. For the modeller, most often the rules for punctuation stem from within the modeller's map, as part of a conscious or unconscious hypothesis out to be proved or disproved. The depth of the modeller's understanding about these rules, and the impact of various punctuation permutations may well determine the quality of the model.

Finally, Peter Carey won the 2001Booker Prize with a book that contained no commas at all, True History of the Kelly Gang. I haven't read it, but I imagine so much will be left the reader's own interpretation of events, which in turn has the potential to create some interesting twists in plot, to say the least. It would certainly be an interesting emotional experience. What if that approach were to be applied to modelling? Would it be the ultimate in code congruence, if the modeller resisted the pull to provide their own connections and interpretations, and left it to the consumer to supply their own self modelled punctuation? A touch of "Here's the ingredients - now cook your own!" Would this be genius or merely a poor incomplete modelling project? Just a thought.

Fran
5 April 2004