Writing Construct: Rough Draft

Sean Demme

9.21.2012

English 1510

Writing Constructs: punctuation

Punctuation isnt important at all its something that people made up way back in the day to make writing more difficult just another aspect to the writing process Isaac babel says no iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place basically he is proving how punctuation only hurts us and our writing

No.

Wrong.

                Clearly, after reading just that little section of puncuationlessness, one can see just how vital our commas and our semicolons are to our writing. Believe it or not punctuation started way back in ancient Greece and Rome when people needed to show where to pause and slowdown in writing speeches. But it wasn’t until the 15 century that we started to put punctuation into our writing. Without it our writing would still be the way it is at the top of this document – we’d all sort of sound like we need some Adderall before and after school. It’s childish sounding, really.

                Richard Nordquist, a retired English Professor of 35 years, writes on About.com of just how our English punctuation was started. Punctuation actually came about in English when we made the first printing press and relied on a single slash (/) as a pause and a double slash (//) as a longer pause. 200 some years later a man by the name of Ben Johnson (sounds like a foreigner…) wrote a book explaining the comma, period, parenthesis, colon, question mark, and the exclamation mark! Yay! Exclamations! These basic explanations helped us to shape our punctuation rules today.

 Another thing to take a gander at is my own experiences with puncuation. When I used to slave over the family computer back in my high school days, I would write and write and write and have my mother revise it. And some of the things she would do would be outdated. The double space after a period, she would do that. And throughout my writings I have developed this outlandish love for dashes – my writing has evolved from my mother and from school. Writing will always be the same grueling process, not bad, just tedious – but one things for sure and that’s that punctuation and grammar are ALWAYS changing and reshaping the form of the writing we have today and in the future.               

A writer from Buzzfeed.com, a social news website, showed fourteen of the punctuation marks in today’s English that I had never seen before – basically, were not known to the average college student. This brings up two questions – why and where. Why do we have extra punctuation marks? Is there a vital mark that we aren’t using? That could drastically change our writing? Why is it that some just aren’t taught? Also, where is it that our writing is headed? It could be that these punctuation marks are outdated, or maybe that our current marks are outdated. It’s imperative that we look back on how our grammar and punctuation have changed and will change more in the future.

It’s quite simple to see just how imperative grammar is to the English language. Try writing a paragraph without any punctuation – it’s like organizing an oversized intersection without stop signs or any stop lights. One can imagine it’s pretty challenging. Not challenging, though, compared to trying to predict where it is our English grammar is headed next. Always evolving and never staying put, our language continues to try to convey what us English (ab)users want to say. The fact of the matter is, punctuation is one of the most important constructs that we have, but just like everything else in the writing field, it is constantly changing.