Thrilling Punctuation Contemplations

Just a warning, this title may have been slightly misleading...but now that you're reading this, why not just keep going?  Sometimes I write about punctuation.  You know why?  For the same reason I usually write about food- it’s something I come in contact with many times a day.  And most of the time I don’t even bother to acknowledge its existence (punctuation, not food- come on, don’t be ridiculous), but today, I decided to give punctuation its fair share of the spotlight.  Perhaps I need to find more exciting things to do…

I’m a fan of punctuation.  I use it often- at least at the end of every sentence, and sometimes even in the middle!  (See previous sentence for both examples).  That’s not to say that I always use it correctly, especially when writing dialogue such as:

            “I swear I just tossed the apple at his head for fun!  I didn’t know it was a bomb!” claimed a skittish Penelope.

            “Well you should have known,” retorted the FBI agent, “since you were the one that grew the apple bomb!”

I’m never exactly sure about punctuation in circumstances like that.  For instance, do you need all the commas?  What’s the deal with capitalization after stating the speaker?  These are all punctuation questions I wonder about, but never actually need to know and therefore never actually look up the correct formatting. 

In other punctuation contemplations (yep, love a good rhyme), I’m really a big fan of ellipses.  As everyone that follows me on twitter (aka, just my mom) is aware, I use ellipses often.  I’m a fan of trying to write as I think, and so ellipses indicate trailing off or thought, and is often how I punctuate my tweet-jokes.  (Again, thanks Mom, for reading).  …Anyway, ellipses can also be used to indicate awkwardness, which is fairly prevalent in my life. 

Other favorite punctuation techniques include comma splicing (which I overuse immensely- sorry English teachers!), parentheses (may overuse these too…sorry readers), dashes (used by me as more abrupt semicolon), and periods (they’re extremely useful).  All in all I’m a big fan of punctuation, in that it shapes the way written words are read and interpreted.  One thing I’ve yet to sort out with punctuation is how to put a (beat.) into writing.  Suggestions?  Because sometimes you just need to take a beat.  (Beat.)  Probably couldn’t come off as more of a nerd right now.   See what I said about the prevalence of awkward?...