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One of the purposes of punctuation is to tell you when to breathe. Imagine that you are an actor, speaking these lines out loud. Not just the dialogue, but the entire story. Will you speak each ...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-20T00:40:35Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41431 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T10:38:40Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41431 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
**One of the purposes of punctuation is to tell you when to breathe.** Imagine that you are an actor, speaking these lines out loud. Not just the dialogue, but the entire story. Will you speak each word immediately after the last, with no changes in speed, no pauses? As an English speaker, you could figure a fair bit of them out without any help (as people do when reading text messages). But punctuation is there to help. Punctuation also helps structure the work, alleviates confusion, and makes it easier to parse. But here the purpose is to tell the reader (or speaker) when to pause and for how long, where to put emphasis, and so on. Commas are brief pauses. They also tell you which words belong together in a phrase. Sometimes a comma is convention, as with putting one at the end of the quote but before the "he said" portion. But others are optional. Read the lines out loud. Any of these could go either way. Do you like the line better with or without the pause? Add or remove the comma to achieve that. The presence or absence of a comma gives them slightly different emotional contexts. > "His folks ain’t ever coming back,” he said with a shake of his head. This implies that the head shake is to emphasize the "no" of the quote. No siree, they aren't coming back. > "His folks ain’t ever coming back,” he said, with a shake of his head. This implies that the head shake is an indication of his feelings about the fact that they aren't coming back. Sadness or disappointment perhaps. It's subtle, but it's there. If you make very small changes to how you speak a sentence, you'll find subtleties there as well. So forget rules about being "outdated" or that tell you you're wrong even when it's grammatically okay. Instead, think of punctuation as ways to guide your reader so that s/he will get your intentions.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-01-19T06:31:52Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 8