Punctuation Points

By Colleen Walsh Fong

I’m on high alert for the Grammar Police this week because National Punctuation Day is September 24th.

Even though I write for a living I have to admit that punctuation is my weakest link. With everything seemingly up for grabs on the American English language front these days it’s hard to know what is acceptable and what is not.

For example, I would have received a severe correction from my elementary school English teacher for beginning a sentence with and or but. But now I do it all the time and I must admit that it is freeing! And I deliberately left the words and and but out of quotation marks just in case the period should have been inside of the closing quotation mark and not outside where I wanted to leave it. I bet you didn’t care if you even noticed.

Still, I want to appear somewhat literate when I communicate even though I’m not sure it matters to anyone under the age of thirty. So I keep a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style on my desk and make the herculean effort to pick it up and flip through it when I can’t find my answer on grammerly.com. Even though this old pal has saved my butt (and prevented many incorrect buts) over the years I find I’m opting for the faster online punctuation check. I figure that if the online checker isn’t correct it’s at least what everyone else will use to try to bust me. So we’ll be on the same page. So to speak.

I’m leaving that “so to speak” as it stands even though my autocorrect is warning me that it is a fragment I should consider revising. Bringing me to that particular resource which I consider to be a misnomer because it often is not correct.

It continually changes my children’s names, my own last name, and many other words I know I have typed correctly. And it doesn’t seem to be able to figure out some pretty obvious things that it could usefully correct for fat-thumbed people like me who accidentally hit “o” instead of “p” when trying to text the word phone. The misspelled word is underlined, but when I tap it for options I get ozone, Rhone, and oink, but not phone. And I’m forever hitting two os when trying to type hopefully and ending up with hooefully. The only correction suggested for that typo is houseful, which never works in my context. So I have to delete the word and thumb the letters out again. I often misuse the word anyway, but I’m going to keep on doing it because I like it. It’s a nice word. It makes me sound upbeat and optimistic even if a bit challenged in the vocabulary department.

I have always been vexed by comma usage so I just leave those out most of the time and I usually get away with it. But I find myself annoyed by what seems to be an over use and incorrect use of ellipses . . . you know, the three dots you’re seeing everywhere. I’m pretty sure, but you can correct me if I’m wrong, that an ellipsis can be used for two things.

The first is to indicate when text is being omitted from a quotation. Specific rules related to the number of sentences being omitted and where the omission ends guide the inclusion of a period mark before or after the ellipsis.

The second correct use of the punctuation mark is to show a break in the flow of a sentence. So maybe its appearance everywhere is a sign of the general breakdown of our collective ability to maintain a steady train of thought. I guess that’s why I try to avoid its use altogether.

I stay away from hyphens, too more out of obstinacy than anything else. The use of them is so prevalent it feels too much like a fad to me. Like I need to stick a hash tag in front of it.

And too many exclamation marks make me look artificially happy! So I try to stick to periods and question marks whenever possible and hopefully readers will sail right by my punctuation errors without notice.

Colleen is a freelance writer specializing in producing custom content for businesses.

Featured Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net