When I was a kid, I loved reading all my dad’s old issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. I noticed that none of the captions that went with the photos or other illustrations had no periods. Does anybody know why? Is there a term for this practice? Did other mags do this? If you need examples, just click this link and look around: Popular Mechanics - Google Books
My user name is in honor of my father who was a master printer. I probably asked him back then, but I don’t remember what he told me!
It’s usually because the blurbs of text are not sentences. Periods should only be used to end sentences. You don’t see periods at the end of news headlines, do you? It’s the same with a caption, unless it’s in the form of a complete sentence.
Click on my link. In the magazine, go to page 22. See “Deskmen typically earn $150 a week”
On page 23, read “Roy Clarke (right), started out as an assembler, has worked up to skilled welder after two years of training”
Page 85, “Bad-guy drivers, who put a tailgating, lane switching show on the road find themselves performing on TV and starring in a replay for the judge”
I never noticed that, but one thing I did truly love. In the old format of Scientific American magazine, picture captions were always composed and typeset so the bottom line also justified right. Not just the caption (3-6 lines) justified right, but the bottom line always to match.
I’m talking about captions inside the magazine, under photos or other illustrations. I checked the May 1980 issue and proper periods were there. Also there in Nov. 2005 issue.
BTW, the second sentence of my original post should read
“I noticed that none of the captions that went with the photos or other illustrations had final periods.”
I see 3 on page 24, but they’re more like labels, and they are sentence fragments. Look on page 80. The caption is a sentence about incense, and it has a period. That period would not have been there in the '60s.
Check out p. 122 in the OPs link. All the captions there have periods. Why the difference? Those captions are not justified. All the other captions are justified so that they fill the space. It’s hard enough to justify everything without adding in an extra character that’s going to annoy you just often enough to throw things at the wall.
You don’t think of the casualness of everyday culture affecting magazines, but before the 1970s the industry would have scorned ragged right captions as being sloppy and unprofessional. But magazines like everything else after the 60s started relaxing their rigidity. Anything went. Including, horrors, ragged right formatting.
My dad hated forced right justification. He thought it created annoying spacing as in the (needing a period) caption on page 121. No, the whale cuts labels don’t count as captions, IMHO.
Captions, especially short ones, quite often are not complete grammatical sentences, but sentence fragments or phrases. Since many captions are not complete sentences (“A boy throwing a ball”), editors might have assumed a no-period policy, and let that stand for all captions whether or not they are complete sentences. A period where there should not be one might be even more glaring.
It’s not unusual to leave off punctuation for a single, stand-alone sentence. You don’t generally see punctuation on a stop sign, for instance.
The purpose of a period is to indicate the end of a sentence. If there’s no more text, that isn’t strictly necessary. Given issues of spacing (it was, after all, newspapers that championed dropping the Oxford comma to save space), leaving off the period made sense. That’s less of an issue now, but tradition and inertia. ( coupled by the fact it causes no problems in comprehension) keep things the way it was.
I have checked several other magazines from the same decade, and they use periods at the end of sentences used as captions. I wonder if it was just a Hearst-imposed style issue.