Editing Written Chinese (section)

=== Layout ===
{{Further|Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts|Chinese punctuation}}
[[File:HK Hung Hom 京都大酒樓 Capital Restaurant Ma Tau Wai Road 35 Fat Kwong Street KMBus Stop.JPG|thumb|right|Chinese written from top-to-bottom on restaurant and bus stop signs in Hong Kong]]

As characters are essentially rectilinear and are not joined with one another, written Chinese does not require a set orientation. Chinese texts were traditionally written in columns from top to bottom, which were laid out from right to left. Prior to the 20th century, Literary Chinese used little to no punctuation, with the breaks between sentences and phrases determined largely by context and the rhythms implied by patterns of syllables.<ref name="HuangEtAl2002">{{Cite conference |last=Huang |first=Liang |display-authors=etal |year=2002 |title=Statistical Part-of-Speech Tagging for Classical Chinese |conference=Text, Speech, and Dialogue: Fifth International Conference |pages=115–122}}</ref>

In the 20th century, the layout used in Western scripts—where text is written in rows from left to right, which are laid out from top to bottom—became predominant in mainland China, where it was mandated by the Chinese government in 1955. Vertical layouts are still used for aesthetic effect, or when space limitations require it, such as on signage or book spines.{{sfnp|Norman|1988|p=80}} The government of [[Taiwan]] followed suit in 2004 for official documents, but vertical layouts have persisted in some books and newspapers.<ref name="BBC2004">{{Cite news |date=4 May 2004 |title=Taiwan Law Orders One-Way Writing |url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3683825.stm |work=BBC |quote=Official Taiwanese documents can no longer be written from right to left or from top to bottom in a new law passed by the country's parliament}}</ref>

Less frequently, Chinese is written in rows from right to left, usually on signage or banners, though a left to right orientation remains more common.<ref name="Go1995.P">{{Cite book |last=Go |first=Ping-gam |title=Understanding Chinese Characters |publisher=Simplex |year=1995 |isbn=978-0-9623113-4-5 |edition=3rd |location=San Francisco |pages=1–31 |language=en,zh}}</ref>

The use of punctuation has also become more common. In general, punctuation occupies the width of a full character, such that text remains visually well-aligned in a grid. Punctuation used in simplified Chinese shows clear influence from that used in Western scripts, though some marks are particular to Asian languages. For example, there are double and single quotation marks (『 』 and 「 」), and a hollow full stop (。), which is used to separate sentences in an identical manner to a Western full stop. A special mark called an ''[[enumeration comma]]'' (、) is used to separate items in a list, as opposed to the clauses in a sentence.