WordWacky

I’m not really a reader of USA Today. I think of it as too conservative and dumbed-down to waste my time on. Sometimes I glance at it over a hotel continental breakfast. And for some reason, my workplace, known for its staggering cumulative intellect, peddles this newspaper exclusively in the cafeterias.

But today, amid the ”greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression,” a friend pointed me to a story by Craig Wilson in the USA Today that is worthy of some note: it’s National Punctuation Day.

Today is National Punctuation Day, a day set aside to reflect on the fact a semicolon is not a medical problem. At least that’s what NPD founder Jeff Rubin, a former newspaperman, wants to impart.

I hesitate to write about punctuation since it has never been my strong suit. Commas especially. Or is it commas, especially?

I have long held the belief that I must have been sick the day commas were taught. Where to put them. When to use them. When not to use them. Do you put one before the conjunction in a simple series of three or more items? (The answer is yes. I just looked it up on Rubin’s website, nationalpunctuationday.com)

I am a great fan of punctuation. Generally I try not to be a prescriptivist when it comes to language rules, but I am so fond of punctuation that it’s difficult for me to keep my directives and opinions to myself. (Lest you now take great joy in scouring my prose for punctuation errors, let me disclaim that I am not perfect, and even the best of us punctuation nerds can benefit from an editor. So please, feel free to correct me.)

Opinions? What would opinions have to do with something so precise as punctuation?

Style guides, those taskmasters of prescriptivism, differ – for example, on the serial comma rule. The Associated Press Stylebook, which lords over the majority of journalism in this country, deletes the serial comma. While The Chicago Manual of Style insists upon it. Maybe it’s because my true love is fiction, but I take Chicago’s side on this (and most other) punctuation quibbles.

I read a good portion of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. I didn’t finish it, in part because it was overdue at the library and in part because though it was funny, I wondered exactly how much of her British punctuation rules really applied to our ‘Merican habits. I did appreciate that, though she was not in favor of comma proliferation, it was a matter of taste, not standards.

I love the comma. For me, that half breath taken is like life itself, breathing its way into sentences. A little pause brings character and drama to otherwise flat, dull sentences. And when there isn’t a pause denoted by the comma, there is visual deliniation, a guide for the reader of the sentence. What commas do is eschew obfuscation — that is, they clarify a sentence. It’s especially important when some knob is trying to read your precious word strings aloud.

So I loved hearing that my liberal peppering of the comma was tolerated, even by those not so comma inclined, like Truss.

I’ve also made dear friends with the semicolon. As Wilson points out in his article, they are somewhat too pretentious for casual communication; I’m loathe to put them in e-mail. But they are handy little buggers, creating conjoined twins of sentences that would otherwise be merely adjacent.

So we come to the exclamation point, that much-maligned symbol of exuberance and emphasis. Like many students of my generation, I was initiated to proper composition with a slim copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. According to Elements, this abrasive slash marring the end of your sentence “is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands.” Egads! We’re using it wrong. Of course, Strunk doesn’t sink to talk at all about multiple exclamation points, which in my opinion are one of the greatest scourges of the Internet.

There we have it, my punctuation manifesto, in honor of National Punctuation Day. [Editor's note: Exclamation point omitted in deference to Strunk and White.]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 6:14 am and is filed under books, events, non-fiction, punctuation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.