Punctuation Matters

The comic is about a little girl who’s afraid of her grandmother’s big dog…

As you can see, the change in punctuation makes a difference. When you write, think about the punctuation!

Okay, now a test. How should you punctuate the labels?

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An easy one for me today. Mark Anderson does some pretty good cartoons related to language. Wouldn’t hurt to check out his site.

How many punctuation marks can you list that aren’t in the picture?

Some punctuation puns.

I should add that an M-dash is three times longer than a hyphen. And be sure to pronounce the second “s” in asterisk.

I don’t know whether you’ll get the allusion to the two famous movie critics, but I thought the comic was cute.

The best way to treat a grammar lesson, by the way, is to soak it all up!

Well, punctuation curmudgeon. It’s Linus Torvalds, the writer (inventor? developer? founder?) of the computer language Linux. I didn’t expect this from him. In fact, I tend to feel that computer languages manage their own grammar and punctuation by not working if you do it wrong.  He recently expressed an opinion about commenting. Comments in computer code are passages for humans to read, that presumably explain what’s going on, but the code itself doesn’t need them. You tell the computer that a passage is a comment with punctuation (that varies from language to language) at the beginning and end of the comment. Here’s a summary of what he said:

He likes this:

/* This is a comment */

He also approves of this:

/*
* This is also a comment, but it can now be cleanly
* split over multiple lines
*/

But he disapproves of this:

(no)
/* This is disgusting drug-induced
* crap, and should die
*/

(no-no-no)
/* This is also very nasty
* and visually unbalanced */

“I’m not even going to start talking about the people who prefer to ‘box in’ their comments, and line up both ends and have fancy boxes of stars around the whole thing,” he adds. “I’m sure that looks really nice if you are out of your mind on LSD, and have nothing better to do than to worry about the right alignment of the asterisks.”

You get the idea. His original essay was quite a bit spicier, and not suitable for a family blog such as this one. If you follow the link, you can start right below the horizontal line.