punctuation part 1

In the following blog post I analyze the points outlined in my Rules for Writers book.

Screenshot taken by Dylan Cotter "punctuation" 10/14/2015 Public Domain Usage

Unnecessary commas:

Sometimes you are just on an absolute tear of a sentence and you have so much to add to it and you never want it to stop and, and, and... Commas are your friend, but only until a certain point. The examples that they provide in the book make it clear that if the part after the comma could be a sentence, it should be sentence. Those examples of independent clauses make sense to me and hopefully will help me avoid the run ons in the future.

Extra or Other punctuation marks

Using punctuation marks like dashes or slashes can add some flare and personality to your writing, as well as serving a literary purpose. However I include this part in this post because i found out some weird facts that I never knew nor have even been corrected on. For example if you are going to use a dash (-) in your writing, you actually need to use two of them (--) for some reason. Interesting.

End Punctuation

Finishing a sentence is an art form. If you include an exclamation mark, you could be forever branded as that guy who uses that exclamation mark. I don't know why, but it is frowned upon in an academic setting. My mother uses exclamation marks all the time in her texts which makes it seem like she is always yelling at me, so I can see how this would be a bad thing to do in an academic paper. The book reinforces this, as well as pointing out that ending sentence with a question mark can be bad, can't it?

Reflection:

I did a peer review of Nick and Carter's essay drafts. I found that the un--needed commas were the biggest problem in most of their drafts as well as mine. It causes run on sentences and makes the reader lose interest because of the length of the sentences. From Nicks essay "Nevertheless, for those interested in the topic of geoengineering, namely “solar geoengineering” (as Keith calls it), or those in support of the methods, the ideas presented by Keith in the interview may be solid evidence of reliable and credible information." While this is a solid sentence, the commas make it way to long. Also for end punctuation section of this blog post, the question marks in their posts work well, unlike what the book said. From Carter's essay "The requirements are supreme and the dedication is plenty too much, but is the payout worth it?" It punctuates it nicely and gets his point across.