Punctuation Wars

from hello.wordsolver.net

I’m battered and bruised. At least my ego is. A casualty of the punctuation wars.

Probably the most important thing to do before you publish a book is edit. (After you write it, of course.) And edit. And edit. Times ten. And then maybe one or three more times just for good measure.

It’s not just the major mistakes you gotta watch for -- like changing the spelling of your protagonist’s last name on page 34 and landing him in the wrong city on page 235 or having him sit down and then two paragraphs along having him sit down again without having gotten him up.

It's punctuation. I am a casualty of punctuation.

One evening my editor, one of my best beta readers, and I were at my dining table discussing my severe comma dysfunction.

One of them said it looked like I took armloads of commas and just splashed them across my manuscript. Laughter ensued.

“Are we supposed to hesitate at every comma?” someone asked, then reading a short passage, she hesitated at each comma. “It’s William Shatner speak!”

Hysteria all around.

Truly, wit is the lowest form of humor.

My writing teacher admonishes us to avoid exclamation points. At his most Hemingway-esque, he avers that if you use the right word or words to show intensity, you don’t need exclamation points.

What about colons and semicolons? Okay. Of course they have their places. All my English teachers have told me so.

Colons in the human anatomy have their place. When functioning properly, they are a most convenient method of waste elimination. Though, strictly speaking, they are not absolutely necessary.

Colons as punctuation, however, are never necessary or convenient. This is my own opinion. And they’re not even cute. But do I find them in my published novel, Murder on Ceres? You got it. Not just semicolons, but colons! Why didn’t I notice them on one of those many editing missions? Eliminate them?

I even have a colon in a quote. What could that possibly sound like in spoken English? The whole point of quotes!

 And quote marks! Should I use them just when someone speaks out loud? What if the character is thinking it?

“Commas and colons and quotes! Oh, my. Commas and colons and quotes! Oh, my.”