Punctuation

"We’re so busy watching out for what’s just ahead of us that we don’t take time to enjoy where we are."

Bill Watterson

Your reader’s attention is delicate. Like a flickering flame, it can easily go dark. The way to keep your copy alight is to not remind the reader they’re reading.

But lots of copy is full of little disturbances.

Writers unwittingly leave stones for their reader to trip on. Stones which make them study the ground they’re walking on, and forget the experience.

It’s the difference between the sentence “I’d like to thank my parents, Beyoncé and God.” where you’re suggesting your parents are actually Beyoncé and God, and the sentence “I’d like to thank my parents, Beyoncé, and God.” where you’re thanking each of the distinct three.

How do you catch these tripping stones so you can cast them off the path?

Re-read your work before you hit send, preferably aloud.

Want a foolproof method? Get someone else to read it to you.

If you’re trying to sell something, and you’ve preoccupied your prospective customer with a study of your bad writing, you’ve done a bad job, and they won’t part with their cash.

Only care about punctuation as much as it affects your meaning.

Its purpose is to puncture writing with space and time in what would otherwise be an endless list of words. Think of punctuation marks as signposts. On a journey you might “take the next right” or “stop at the junction”.

On a journey through words you might “take a breath”, or “pause”, because what follows is a new path.

Literary signposts are degrees of connection or separation between ideas. The more connected the ideas, the less space needs to exist between them. The further the ideas are from each other, the more space is needed to guide the reader. So, from a comma to a completely new chapter, signposts are only there to make our meaning, and the journey through it, clear.

Somehow punctuation got complicated. Like, when do you use a semi-colon? And, what's the difference between a hyphen (-), an en dash (–), and an em dash (—)?

The good news? You don’t have to care. I’ll repeat my first line

“Only care about punctuation as much as it affects your meaning.”

You have two solid punctuation friends you can depend on to navigate your reader. Our friends are the full stop and the comma. You can write extraordinary sentences with just these two.

And if you were to marry one, propose to the full stop.