It started with words. Short words. Long, intricate words with lovely sounds, like gonorrhea and it’s neighbor, diarrhea. Words are nothing, however, if not grouped into charming sentences. Sentences make up stories and stories whiled away my childhood hours. Not so much “whiling” of hours today, but I still don’t pass a day without reading fiction.
My punctuation issue was a natural out-growth of this word-love.
When I was a bored kid with no library books, I once resorted to reading from the family set of encyclopedias. Many of my childhood memories have a reading theme, not that I grew up in a literary home (far from the truth), but most of the moments I remember, I had a book in hand. Writing them was a natural progression.
I suppose I’ve always had this punctuation tendency. I can actually remember–to this day–a beautiful, perfectly-punctuated sentence by Georgette Heyer, who I first fell in love with after reading her as a young teen. In Arabella, when the hero accepts the heroine’s proposal, he meets her at an art exhibit to agree to marry her. Heyer wrote, “Miss Tallant, obediently walking on to stare at one of the new Associates’ Probationary Pictures (described in her catalogue as “An Old Man soliciting a Mother for Her Daughter who was shewn Unwilling to consent to so disproportionate a match”) said baldly, ‘yes.'”
I remember first reading this–caught up in the story–and stopping to stare at and re-read the sentence, not because I didn’t understand it, but because Heyer had put together a beautiful, complicated, very well punctuated sentence. I loved that this wordy sentence ended with one word of dialogue. It was wonderful.
My love of punctuation has evolved since I’ve become active on social media. Much can be conveyed with a well-placed exclamation point! As with all good things, moderation is important.
I realize not everyone has this punctuation affinity. I once removed all the commas from a page of text written by a good friend of mine who is comma-challenged and comma-uninterested. When I gave her the page of text to look at, she didn’t even realize it had no commas. As this friend is an increasingly-successful author who has grown to accept the necessity of some commas, I think her punctuation is fine.
In this world, we all have our issues. One of mine is a possibly-extreme love of punctuation.
It’s good to know our own tendencies.