Embrace the Beast
The Rules of Punctuation
If you don’t use it, you lose it…
~Fitz
What do you really need to learn? What teaching and what practice will help you learn what you “really need to learn” in a way that will somehow stay with you and be useful and necessary to your life.
Most all of you are pretty lucky I did not “grade” your most recent essay harshly for missing and misused punctuation, though I probably should have graded those few students who were in my class more harshly. It’s only fair. I practically beat them over the head last year with comma rules, hyphens, long dashes and semi-colons, brackets and the weird three-dot thingy. If they have forgotten, I blame myself. What kind of English teacher can’t teach what is basic and critical to good writing?
Me, I guess…
I think when the average teenager hears the word “rules,” he or she immediately starts building a wall to keep that rule out of mind and out of sight. It’s too bad because rules are what keep us going, and if we don’t keep going, the fun ends. Imagine Fortnite if someone hacked the system and no one could be blotted off the screen? Imagine the millions of whining men and boys across the world having hissy fits and swearing into headphone mics when their perfectly placed snipe had no effect on the clueless soldier hopping across the screen?
Imagine soccer without goals. Imagine bread without flour. Imagine the earth without a sky. Imagine words could be any jumble of letters. Songs could be any arrangement of notes–parents could choose their kids and kids choose their parents…
Get where I am going?
And what does this have to do with punctuation?
Punctuation simply connects “thoughts” (clauses) and “fragments of thoughts” (phrases) together in a way that mimics and reproduces the effect of an ordinary conversation–or a profound rendering of poetry, or a stupid and insipid movie you wasted ten dollars going to see on an otherwise perfectly fine Friday night. As far as the written word goes, the rules of punctuation follow the laws of physics. Without them, nothing holds together.
Where does this leave you, coming with trepidation to the assignment page?
It leaves you in the crosshairs of a cold and calculating teacher measuring the distance between himself and his unsuspecting students–measuring their capacity for genius; discerning what exactly will help them learn, remember, practice and use “The Rules of Punctuation.”
You will find that The Rules of Punctuation are a beast you cannot slay; you cannot avoid, and you cannot ignore.
Your only option is to Embrace the Beast, wrestle it down and hold it down until it is tame, and when it is tamed, morphed into a friend and ally, it will follow you around the rest of your life and will always be faithful to you, protect you and strengthen you.
And maybe then you can pen a letter of thanks to me, long since retired and living off the memories of students who actually gave a damn and made something with their lives.
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