Punctuation Overload!

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly. — Lynne Truss

One foggy morning, as I trawled through some of my unfinished ‘Masterpieces’ to publish on Medium, it became obvious I had overused the Punctuation Mark!

I tend to do this for effect, but if it’s used too often it will lose the impact. The lesson this morning, is to use language to make my story more exciting, relatable and to resonate with readers.

Most of us are familiar with the phrase:

‘The teacher said the boy was a fool;’ as opposed to:

‘The teacher, said the boy, was a fool.’ The same sentence but with completely different meanings due to the punctuation.

Grammarly will help us when we take a wrong turn, but cannot provide the basic information we need, or to be discerning and critical of our work.

For fiction writers, the need for the reader to turn the next page at the end of a chapter is invaluable. Setting that up in practice is anything but easy — too many ‘cliff-hangers’ and the story can lose its allure.

The skill of the writer is to paint a masterpiece using words to describe dramatic scenes. It will be a tragedy if this skill is lost with AI? To me AI seems to be a correct way of doing things, but devoid of feeling in many cases.

The importance of writing for me has more to do with keeping my brain healthy and my personality cheerful. Even betrayals and spiteful comments are useful, especially if they’re clever and unique.

As a writer, once we manage to tame our anger and impatience about injustice, some very wise and profound work can be written. One of my friends has given me helpful advice over the years — when I’m getting worked up about something, she says “you need to get out of your own way.” How true those words are, but rarely are we able to see ourselves us as others see us.

The biggest danger, that many readers ignore at their peril is ‘plagiarism’, however, Grammarly also have an option for that — phew!

Thank you for reading to … The End