My friends,
The time has come to stand against the army of punctuation haters threatening to destroy our beautiful language! There are so few acceptable ways to construct a sentence – and even fewer ways to control the flow and cadence. Hence, our helpful little friends: punctuation marks!
Lately, there has been much rage spent on the fate of the semi-colon; it is the least understood and therefore greatest tool in the box. It’s just another period, really.
Then the comma hate. The stut, stut, stut, stut, stutter haters. Shame on you! Let us stammer out our prose with a little buckboard road background rattling, bouncing, jostling, and jolting our way into your cold, cold hearts ….
And the em dash … the poor, poor em dash – stolen by artificial intelligence as a banner against the human writer!
The hate on ellipses. The hate on italics. The hate on exclamations! The hate on parenthesis as pretentious asides beyond the fourth wall. If you combine all the latent grammar haters into one compendium, all that would leave us with are periods. Period.
“Or do you want to have to ask questions all the damn time?”