The importance of punctuation

[igenlode]

I *know* that people feel that the originality and emotional impact of their ideas ought to be far more important to the reader than any minor nit-picking stuff like spelling, grammar or punctuation... but when I get asked to read a story where plurals are persistently formed using the greengrocer's apostrophe and every sentence/paragraph containing dialogue ends with a hanging comma (and indeed every non-dialogue sentence is a long run-on punctuated *only* by commas) -- I can't. I just can't. I don't care how good the content is, though the odds are frankly against it: the presentation makes it absolutely inaccessible.

Comments

[watervole]

Snap!