Punctuation and Sentences

Also, I can’t help but recall I once lost an adjunct job on the basis of punctuation. It was an informal interview (so I thought) at breakfast, until the geriatric director started quizzing me on punctuation. He gave one question about whether to add a comma after a certain word (I forget the word) at the beginning of a sentence, and I said no, and that was it. I was finished. He never emailed me to reject me, just never talked to me again. I, on the other hand, emailed the grammar nazi to show him the rule that allowed for a bit of flexibility. But he was an old school grammar fiend, a relic of the 1940s, and didn’t budge. Oh well. I’m a fiction writer, see, and commas don’t own me as much as I own them.

The rules of punctuation have seemed to relax, however, in the journalistic world in the last century, and in fiction, with the all-powerful advent of “voice,” you can get away with virtually anything as long as you’re consistent. But every now and again, I meet someone still stuck on the old rules, insisting that they’re right. It’s funny: they seem to have forgotten that we’re the ones to make up the grammatical rules, and not the other way around. I’m all for consistency, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a philosophical position of mine that grammar and spelling and all that mess should continue to evolve, or else language itself will ossify. I mean, you don’t hear anyone complaining about the change from using “him” to signify all of mankind, to the necessity of using “him and her.”

So while other Profs probably lecture their kids on all the fine points of the comma (which I do at times, I admit), I always make sure to include a section on the malleability on the part of language that seems most inflexible. I tell them how punctuation has changed, and how it will change, and to learn the rules now and adapt when they change, because language is a very complex game that humans like to play and it’s fun to comply at some points and break all the rules at others.

But then I tell them that they have to comply with the rules in my class. Such a spoilsport, I know.