Lack of final periods in old magazine captions

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@Derleth

The advent of modern typography allows us to right-justify text which cannot be justified in any other fashion.

You can justify any text. Modern typography just makes it easier and look somewhat nicer. Except when computers do stupid things, which is often.

[Procrustus]

I wonder why whale farming never took off. See page 118.

[pulykamell]

@RealityChuck

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.

Yeah, but the examples have several sentences in a row, all which are properly punctuated, except the last one, which omits the period. Check out the example on page 22 that the OP referenced, and the captions in the pages following.

This is pretty interesting to me and not something I’ve ever noticed before. I’m guessing it has something to do with right justification of the text, and perhaps to make it look cleaner than ending on a right justified period or having a period hang over the edge of the last letter of the right justified line? That’s about the only thing I could think of.

[ElderSign]

I knew an old school boxing magazine writer from the northeast who told me years ago that due to fragmented sentences, the in-house style for captions was to leave off all end periods consistently, including complete sentences.

[Colophon]

I’m a newspaper sub-editor and our style is never to use full stops at the end of picture captions. Even multi-sentence captions have no full stop on the final sentence (although the previous sentences do of course have them).

Similarly with pull quotes and other short pieces of text. It just looks fussy to have them. Text panels are a thornier issue. A sidebar with a series of bullet points would not usually have full stops, but if they were more like short paragraphs then they probably would. Further complicating matters these days is the number of text panels, captions etc that end with a URL. URLs look horrible with a full stop at the end.

[SanVito]

@california_jobcase

Ragged, it seems. Curiously, in the may '90 edition of Popular Mechanics, I see plenty of justified article text, but the captions aren’t.

You wouldn’t justify captions - they might only be two words long.

[SanVito]

@Colophon

Further complicating matters these days is the number of text panels, captions etc that end with a URL. URLs look horrible with a full stop at the end.

They also give an incorrect URL, for those who may not realise the full stop isn’t part of the address, so I’ve long taken it as standard practice to leave off full stops in these instances.

[commasense]

@Colophon

I’m a newspaper sub-editor and our style is never to use full stops at the end of picture captions. Even multi-sentence captions have no full stop on the final sentence (although the previous sentences do of course have them).

Similarly with pull quotes and other short pieces of text. It just looks fussy to have them. Text panels are a thornier issue. A sidebar with a series of bullet points would not usually have full stops, but if they were more like short paragraphs then they probably would. Further complicating matters these days is the number of text panels, captions etc that end with a URL. URLs look horrible with a full stop at the end.

I’m glad someone with real world experience came in to say this, because my guess* was going to be that it was simply a style issue. Someone, somewhere decided he didn’t like the look of a period at the end of a caption, set that as the rule, and it spread.

Or maybe, as suggested above, many early captions were sentence fragments that didn’t take a full stop, and the assumption became that no captions would take one.

It may not be possible to find a better answer than, “it’s that publication’s style.”

• I am editor and publisher of my own print newsletter, but had no previous experience in publishing (other than having a father who worked at a newspaper) and so created all of my own styles. My captions have periods.

[california_jobcase]

@Exapno_Mapcase

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.

Check out the awkward spacing in the peanut butter bit on p. 122.
“Although they look like Egyptian monuments,xxxthese pyramids…”
I see why they did it, but it makes me want to read “…shipment to world market these pyramids…”

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@california_jobcase

Check out the awkward spacing in the peanut butter bit on p. 122.
“Although they look like Egyptian monuments,xxxthese pyramids…”
I see why they did it, but it makes me want to read “…shipment to world market these pyramids…”

Yeah, but it’s the second line that’s got the worst of it. Those words are so far apart they look like refrigerator magnet poetry.