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My Great, Manic Comma Blizzard – and My Torrid Tryst with a Dash

When you stare at words all day, it starts to affect you.

Lately I have written so much that I see sentences floating behind my eye-lids when I am trying to go to sleep; even worse is that I often try to revise them. In light of this, it may not be surprising that I sometimes go too far, and that I have begun to take exaggerated notice of the marks that linger inside the text I write – modifying, pausing, quoting, exclaiming.

To illustrate, my husband recently informed me that a girl editing my e-book said that she liked my book, but that I had used a lot of commas. He said this with a grim intensity that alarmed me. On one hand, my impulse was to hotly defend my punctuation honor. But below this impulse was the sighing thought, Oh, yeah. The commas.

I cleared my throat. “Well, did I use them incorrectly?” I asked, attempting to regather my pride.

He shook his head. “No. She just said you used a lot of them.”

“Huh.”

My wounded pride was soon eclipsed by my anxiety over an impending comma withdrawal. I had known that I made liberal use of commas; I had not known I had been guilty of a comma blizzard deserving of reprimand – and intervention. The thought of letting go of them made me unhappy.

I used to be frugal with commas, knowing the rule driven home in my English 101 class: to use them sparingly, like salt, and only when absolutely necessary.
However, that was before I had formed any special feelings about them.

In my writing I had become fascinated with what commas did to sentences, how the gentle curves set words softly apart, the way they could add a clause as a musing afterthought at the tail of a sentence – how they subtly altered voice, tone and rhythm.

Commas, and all punctuation, are small but powerful. In the alien, two dimensional universe where text lives, commas do what is impossible in the tangible world: they slow time, taming the irresistible march of words. They are only a little less powerful than periods, which bring a thought skidding to an abrupt halt.

Of course, commas were not my first punctuation infatuation. Before that, I had been caught in the feverish grip of a semi-colon addiction. I liked how a semi-colon gave the same definite halt of a period, while merging ideas like a comma.

Then, in my reading I discovered that I had been using semi-colons all wrong – following them with conjunctions like “and” or “but,” something I had seen famous writers do, but which is technically wrong.

On a desperate semi-colon rebound, I became a liberal dash user. In my whirlwind fling with dashes, I filled my text with lighthearted interruptions and unrelated afterthoughts. However, despite their charms, they did not quite replace the semi-colon, which is so much softer than the abrupt dash.

Soon I had yielded to the luring embrace of commas. At the same time, I developed an irrational loathing for apostrophes, and even started rewording sentences to avoid them.

As with any obsessive compulsive behavior, I found a way to rationalize it. Apostrophes, I concluded, were the upstarts of the punctuation world, breaking up words like a bratty kid brother, arrogantly floating above the words that actually mean something – interrupting the smooth, visual flow.

When I told my parents this, they seemed concerned about me. They had a point. When, while writing, you start to see hubris in apostrophes, it is probably time to take a cookie break.

In my defense, nature has not prepared humans for life in the alien dimension of text. The brain is conditioned to see human qualities in everything, to see faces where there are none, such as likenesses of famous figures in natural cave formations – or the Virgin Mary stamped on toast.

When you write a lot, the mind rebels at the sterile mechanics of punctuation, and the imagination steps in to save you from boredom; printed symbols can then morph into Rorschach ink blots, drawing out irrational emotions from the seething darkness of the subconscious.

What childhood trauma, I wondered, has caused me to see arrogance in apostrophes? What frustrated infantile need for motherly attachment has caused me to see benevolent softness in commas – or compromising amiability in semi-colons?

Of course, all of my dramatic musings were probably just a way to avoid the real issue. Aside from the psychology of punctuation manias was the more practical challenge of taming my comma excesses.

To address this, I have been studying commas – when to use them, when not to; I am determined to justify every one I use from now on. The rule of thumb is that even if you can quote rules to justify them, if they are not absolutely needed for clarity or readability, omit them.

As I wean myself from the nurturing solace of commas, I wonder what new punctuation manias lie in wait for me. Will I become obsessed with the coy mystery of the question mark? The comforting closure of a period? The wild exuberance of the exclamation point?

Or will I, one day, finally see that a punctuation mark is just a mark – dull evidence of a keystroke breaking a long stream of characters into easy-to-read parts?

If so, I am not sure I look forward to that day. I think I might prefer an arrogant apostrophe to a purely mechanical one, especially if I have to look at it all day.

In the rational world the glamour of punctuation fades, leaving only dull, sterile symbols devoid of all magic – frustrating the primal longing for the friendly comma, the exuberant exclamation point, or the safe, solid period.

The imagination looks for meaning in anything that is put in front of it, transforming a dash into a rude gesture, a semi-colon into a wink, a question mark into a flirt – or a grilled cheese sandwich into a Virgin Mary, smiling with saintly benevolence inside a bread crust frame.

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