Punctuator's Anonymous
Hi, my name is Shannon, and I’m addicted to parentheses. Not just parentheses, commas too, and the dash, - how I love the initial and final dash - to set off ideas in my sentences. I know I once knew this stuff. I know what comes at the end of a question or a "declarative" sentence. But I am lost in a sea of punctuation when I try to quote a question inside parentheses at the end of a sentence. An example would be:(I wonder to myself, “Why am I addicted to parentheses?”). There are times when I am writing up an essay that I stop to consider how many punctuation marks a person can put in a row and still be within the limits of grammatically correct. I believe my personal record is five, with a word in quotes inside a quote ending in a question mark, followed by a parenthesis, and period : ‘”?). (Hey look! That sentence had six!) I have the spell/grammar check turned on - Microsoft Word is welcome to put its wavy green line under these creations and mark them as mistakes, but typically it never does. My personal opinion on Word’s lack of interest in punctuation is that it wants to encourage people to use symbols rather than swear words, in sentences such as “I can’t believe this #$%^ idiot uses so many *&%#^ punctuation marks when she writes these ?:<”$# lame pieces of <>:”$#@!!!”
I know I learned a lot about grammar growing up, since I went to good schools. In fact, I know that it is very bad to use the word “very” since it weakens the thought, and yet I do it very often. I know that you should not end a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes I don’t know what else to end it with. I can identify a run-on sentence with the best of them – in fact I can remember sitting in Mrs. Devine’s seventh grade English class and picking out run-on sentences from countless worksheets and textbooks, particularly in the lessons where you are supposed to identify fragments also. Oh, fragments - bad. I know you are supposed to use “one” instead of “you” when referring to a person other than myself, but you know how it goes.
If there was one activity in 8th grade that I led the pack in, it was diagramming sentences. I could assign a name, purpose, and place on the diagram to every word in every sentence that came my way. What I was never so hot at, was taking the words off the diagram and figuring out how to put them in a sentence with proper punctuation. Now that I have chosen the run-on sentence as a style, the rules of punctuation should be more important to me, I should be making more of an effort to indicate where one thought ends and the next begins, I should utilize that red-headed stepchild of punctuation, the semi-colon, so that people would understand what is going on in these seemingly endless sentences.
I remember sophomore year in high school Sister Michaela made us answer essay questions about American authors in the style of the author. Maybe answering the Ernest Hemingway essay question caused me to suffer a chemical imbalance which led me to adopt (or should I say bastardize) his long, long sentence structure. Story-wise, I definitely preferred the John Steinbeck novels that we read, but apparently his style didn’t rub off on me at all. So maybe substance is more important than style, and if you are saying something interesting, people will listen whether your sentences are long and convoluted or short and choppy. When I write I imagine that I am saying things out loud, and I don’t seem to be a very good storyteller – I can rarely hold anyone’s attention long enough to get to the end of my story. With this in mind, I probably just write like I would speak - I have so much to add to a topic, and so much fear that no one is going to stop and listen to the whole of what I have to say, that I string it all together in one long sentence in hopes I get it all out before my audience wanders away.
I wish I had taken more classes on writing in college, but as a chemistry major, few of the electives I was offered involved the finer points of essay writing. I’m sure I summarized some technical articles, and I know I wrote laboratory reports, but in technical writing, all aspects of style are sacrificed in the name of simplicity and organization. No one really cares to compliment your sentence structure, particularly if it becomes so complicated that the central idea is hard to follow. I know some people might argue that non-technical essays are also hard to read if your sentence structure is complicated, but I for one, don’t really mind rereading a complicated sentence if the pay off is especially clever (and I’m not claiming that this is ever the case with me).
With all apologies to the English, History, and Philosophy departments, the college class that taught me the most about writing was Mr. Toolin’s first-year physics lab. Mr. Toolin gave every student six lines on the front of each laboratory report for the abstract. We were told that these six lines must include the purpose of the experiment, the procedure, and the conclusions. The abstract was something like 25% of the grade for each experiment, since he wanted us to learn that if you couldn’t explain what you had done, why you had done it, and what you found out, no one would go past the abstract; no one would bother looking inside to see the data, and thus there was no sense in doing the experiment in the first place. I had to rewrite abstracts over and over again to get them to the proper length while retaining the proper information. I think the stringent requirements of Mr. Toolin’s abstract writing are the source of all the praise my writing I received in the working world. I know how to identify and toss out every extraneous word thanks to the unrelenting tutelage of Mr. Toolin. But here I have no such need, no one will really care if I stick in extra words (and punctuation marks). Some people might actually enjoy it.
But to think some people might enjoy it is to let myself off the hook. I should learn a way to express myself without endless asides and parentheses and commas and dashes, but I only have time to do one thing at a time, and right now what I am doing is getting into the habit of writing. Once I have a firmly established habit, maybe then I will clean up my act and get into the habit of writing nicely. Until then I guess any readers I find will have to muddle through with me and try to find their way around these sentences. Hey, it’s season finale week on TV, what else is there to do this summer?
I know I learned a lot about grammar growing up, since I went to good schools. In fact, I know that it is very bad to use the word “very” since it weakens the thought, and yet I do it very often. I know that you should not end a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes I don’t know what else to end it with. I can identify a run-on sentence with the best of them – in fact I can remember sitting in Mrs. Devine’s seventh grade English class and picking out run-on sentences from countless worksheets and textbooks, particularly in the lessons where you are supposed to identify fragments also. Oh, fragments - bad. I know you are supposed to use “one” instead of “you” when referring to a person other than myself, but you know how it goes.
If there was one activity in 8th grade that I led the pack in, it was diagramming sentences. I could assign a name, purpose, and place on the diagram to every word in every sentence that came my way. What I was never so hot at, was taking the words off the diagram and figuring out how to put them in a sentence with proper punctuation. Now that I have chosen the run-on sentence as a style, the rules of punctuation should be more important to me, I should be making more of an effort to indicate where one thought ends and the next begins, I should utilize that red-headed stepchild of punctuation, the semi-colon, so that people would understand what is going on in these seemingly endless sentences.
I remember sophomore year in high school Sister Michaela made us answer essay questions about American authors in the style of the author. Maybe answering the Ernest Hemingway essay question caused me to suffer a chemical imbalance which led me to adopt (or should I say bastardize) his long, long sentence structure. Story-wise, I definitely preferred the John Steinbeck novels that we read, but apparently his style didn’t rub off on me at all. So maybe substance is more important than style, and if you are saying something interesting, people will listen whether your sentences are long and convoluted or short and choppy. When I write I imagine that I am saying things out loud, and I don’t seem to be a very good storyteller – I can rarely hold anyone’s attention long enough to get to the end of my story. With this in mind, I probably just write like I would speak - I have so much to add to a topic, and so much fear that no one is going to stop and listen to the whole of what I have to say, that I string it all together in one long sentence in hopes I get it all out before my audience wanders away.
I wish I had taken more classes on writing in college, but as a chemistry major, few of the electives I was offered involved the finer points of essay writing. I’m sure I summarized some technical articles, and I know I wrote laboratory reports, but in technical writing, all aspects of style are sacrificed in the name of simplicity and organization. No one really cares to compliment your sentence structure, particularly if it becomes so complicated that the central idea is hard to follow. I know some people might argue that non-technical essays are also hard to read if your sentence structure is complicated, but I for one, don’t really mind rereading a complicated sentence if the pay off is especially clever (and I’m not claiming that this is ever the case with me).
With all apologies to the English, History, and Philosophy departments, the college class that taught me the most about writing was Mr. Toolin’s first-year physics lab. Mr. Toolin gave every student six lines on the front of each laboratory report for the abstract. We were told that these six lines must include the purpose of the experiment, the procedure, and the conclusions. The abstract was something like 25% of the grade for each experiment, since he wanted us to learn that if you couldn’t explain what you had done, why you had done it, and what you found out, no one would go past the abstract; no one would bother looking inside to see the data, and thus there was no sense in doing the experiment in the first place. I had to rewrite abstracts over and over again to get them to the proper length while retaining the proper information. I think the stringent requirements of Mr. Toolin’s abstract writing are the source of all the praise my writing I received in the working world. I know how to identify and toss out every extraneous word thanks to the unrelenting tutelage of Mr. Toolin. But here I have no such need, no one will really care if I stick in extra words (and punctuation marks). Some people might actually enjoy it.
But to think some people might enjoy it is to let myself off the hook. I should learn a way to express myself without endless asides and parentheses and commas and dashes, but I only have time to do one thing at a time, and right now what I am doing is getting into the habit of writing. Once I have a firmly established habit, maybe then I will clean up my act and get into the habit of writing nicely. Until then I guess any readers I find will have to muddle through with me and try to find their way around these sentences. Hey, it’s season finale week on TV, what else is there to do this summer?
posted by Shannon at 10:40 PM
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