MIND YOUR PUNCTUATION

In our quest for short  messages and instant replies we have atrociously violated language. But before getting there we had begun with ignoring all punctuation rules. In this day and age when people almost everyone is involved in microblogging and a good number of people are now writing on their own blogs, grammar and punctuation mistakes have become more rampant. The worst part is that we carry them on to where they should never appear; which makes me think that we should just stick to the rules everywhere, isn’t that what makes the language beautiful? The importance of correct punctuation cannot be overemphasized. Punctuation is what makes the reader hear the writer’s voice. It carries with it clarity, tone and even the message itself.

One of the most blatantly misused of punctuation marks is the comma. This blog post is not enough to state the instances where the comma is abused. I would have to type my fingers sore if I were to write the many situations in which the comma is misused and where it is supposed to be used. Most of the time we aren’t aware that we are misusing the comma, we just do it unconsciously. Sometimes there’s just that irresistible urge to litter your sentences with commas since you think they are too long. Wrongly placed commas can be hilarious while lack of commas can be grave. You can entirely change the meaning by wrongly placing a comma or omitting one.

omitting a comma can cost someone's life! 

Used to play around with meaning, quotation marks have indiscriminately proliferated in all sorts of texts. Quotation marks are unique in their own way; they are the only quotation marks that are used in literary styles to produce sarcasm, they will provoke you to think more about the connotative meaning of the quoted word. The apostrophe hasn’t been spared either in as much as it’s its use is the easiest to master after the full stop. Apostrophes are only used to show possession and in contractions. However you have to master the exception, its, in possessive form does not have an apostrophe, it’s, with an apostrophe is the contraction of it is. In that light ‘til cannot be used to mean until and when you write the 70’s you mean something belongs to 70 or perhaps ‘70s as in 1970-1079. Pluralizing family name doesn’t require an apostrophe lest you need to show that something belongs to them. For words ending with an s the apostrophe to show possession comes after the s, including plural nouns.

Someone call apostrophe police!

We all like putting several exclamation marks after a statement or a word to emphasize the gravity of the matter or maybe anything else. This may be excusable in sms and social media but still, overuse of exclamation marks leaves one wondering what exactly is being emphasized, I visualize it as someone just shouting around. Likewise in ellipses only three dots (…) should be used and not four. As far as punctuation is concerned, this is just a tip of the iceberg, we haven’t mentioned hyphenation, capitalization and dashes.

Proper Punctuation matters

We are in a generation that knows colons as tools of making an emoticon and can only appear in L or J and semi colons are only used to wink ;-) accompanied by a message which has no sense of grammar or sometimes meaningless to intellectual minds. Given that using the two may be tricky, it is better to leave them out than use the wrongly. However it doesn’t break a bone to remember a simple rule a put by grammarly, one of the most popular grammar blogs. The rule is: “A colon should not separate a noun from its verb, a verb from its object or subject complement, a preposition from its object, nor a subject from its predicate.” Am starting to feel that my text here has too many commas. Moreover I know a class six lesson, on a blog post is not your cup of tea, how often do we even write apart from school work and who even marks your poorly punctuated Facebook status updates and tweets. So it’s only fair I stop at his point but remember; good punctuation is beautiful, lack of punctuation marks is harrowing and misuse of punctuation marks is awful.