To introduce the subject of punctuation, I'd like to just talk about our attitude
towards punctuation. And I think often what happens is that we have a sort of
conflicted attitude, because on the one hand we we laugh at punctuation mistakes,
but we often don't actually take it seriously enough to really make the
effort to learn what the different punctuation rules are. We kind of
fumble along intuitively and try to make some sense of it. So what I'd like to
talk about is really this effort of shifting from the more comical aspects
of misused punctuation to the more serious effort to really understand
what's going on. The more comical side of it is illustrated by these kinds
of sayings and quotations and signs. I think you've probably seen these kinds
of things if you've looked on Facebook in the last little while, and
some of your friends may have posted these kinds of things. So the first one
here -- if somebody says "let's eat dad!" -- this should be a comma here, because we don't
really want to eat dad. And then the second one here is called the grocer's
apostrophe, because you see it in a lot of grocery stores ... where we've used
an apostrophe to form the plural, which is incorrect. And then the last one is
this funny kind of sign that implies that the pedestrians are slippery when
wet. You can look up these things online and you'll see way more
signs and funny sayings like this. But the trouble is: how do we get from here
to actually really thinking about punctuation and how it works.
So I have an example here, and what I'd like you to think about as you as you
look at this example is that we have to make the connection between
punctuation and these other parts of grammar, which are sentence structure and
parts of speech. That is really the onerous task. You need to know
something about how sentence structure works, how clauses work, how phrases
work, and if you haven't really mastered that, then you need to go back and study
that and then come to punctuation. Because otherwise it really doesn't make
sense. If you can't find the subject, for instance, you're going to have a bit of a
struggle with punctuation. But if you do know those things, then
there is a real beauty to punctuation. Because a lot of it makes complete sense.
So if we look at this example, for instance -- "In the beginning, we just wanted
an adventure; in the end, we just wanted to go home" -- we have a nice parallel
structure here. Each of these parts of the sentence (separated by the
semicolon here) starts with an introductory phrase. "In the beginning ... in
the end." So we can map this out. We can say well this is an introductory
phrase, and we're just going to put in a box here, and then we're going to put a
comma after it. And then we get an independent clause...
Together these can form a sentence. But we can also stick a semicolon
between these two, and then we repeat the same thing again, so then we have our
second introductory phrase and our second independent clause, and when we do
this we can see that these things are very neatly parallel and there's a kind
of beauty to this. If we know these kinds of things, if we know that a semicolon
typically connects two independent clauses that are closely linked like
this, then we don't succumb to what I sometimes tend to think of as
the breathing theory of punctuation, which is this notion that when you write
you should just think of punctuation as the spaces where there's a pause. If
you have a longer pause you put a semicolon, [and with] a shorter pause it's a comma and
so on. That is complete rubbish. Well, there's some truth to it because sometimes
you do pause, but it's really misleading and you end up with all these
weird situations where you have semicolons that are in the wrong place,
commas that are unnecessary, and that's because people haven't taken the trouble
to really understand grammar, to understand sentence structure, and parts
of speech. But I do promise you that if you work through the sections on
punctuation you're going to see the beauty of punctuation, and it will
actually have a great deal of clarity and if you think about the different
parts of the sentences working together, and punctuation as connecting those
different parts, you're really going to enjoy the lessons on punctuation
and it's going to make a lot of sense.