This week has been horrendously busy, as the last week of winter often is. Spring cleaning for house guests, getting out into the garden to clean up the mess of winter storms, and editing most of the punctuation out of my last novel have collectively just about done me in.
Most people understand the first two chores, but might wonder why I have to edit out most of the punctuation in my novel.
Because most readers today don't understand those pesky little dots and squiggles we writers like to stick between the letters of our words (apostrophes and hyphens) and the words of our sentences (semi-colons, colons, parentheses, dashes, etc.).
I'm an English teacher. I've taught college students the why's and how's of those dots and squiggles for many years. And now I'm going to blog about punctuation--the lost art.
I'll discuss why punctuation is important, and give lots of clear, concise examples of correct and incorrect usage. Readers should be understand the difference between a hyphen and a dash, single vs. double quotation marks, and where to place the darned period when writing a line of dialogue.
Because, with the enormous number of people using text to communicate, correct punctuation is more important than ever.
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