Punct//>iat!,,;;ion!

Ever read Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes?  If you haven’t, you really should.  It’s a fantastic book about a severely mentally handicapped person who becomes super-intelligent thanks to medicine, then chronicles his mental decline back to an IQ of 60.

In the book, the protagonist (Charlie Gordon) keeps a journal of his mental rise then fall.  Near the beginning, his tutor teaches him about punctuation.  Unable to initially comprehend the concept, Charlie adds commas, periods, question marks, brackets, etc. everywhere.  As his intelligence grows, Charlie understands punctuation and curses his earlier mistakes.

Why does he curse himself?  Because punctuation is an essential part of writing.  Sure you can understand a text without punctuation, but it’s a lot more difficult.  And if you include too much punctuation, then you’ve really confused your reader.  Think of it as signposts for your audience; that is, punctuation tells them how to read a story.  Is it a question or an exclamation?  Is there a pause or should I keep on reading?

There are lots of errors writers routinely make, but there’s a few that are so common that you should always be on the lookout for them as in addition to being common (or perhaps as a consequence thereof), those few errors are very noticeable.  Writing as a Guest Blogger for Copyblogger, Daniel Scocco of Daily Writing Tips goes over the following six:

•  Apostrophe For Plurals
• The Comma Splice
• Quotation Marks for Emphasis
• Multiple Punctuation Marks
• Punctuation Outside Quotation Marks
• The Missing Comma After Introductory Elements

So read up!  NaNoWriMo is coming up very soon, and you want your stuff to be grammatically up to snuff, right?  Right.

And what grammar mistake do you find the most annoying?  For me, it’s when people write ‘c’ instead of ‘yes’ on AIM.  But in writing… when people include one too many dots in an ellipse…….