Natalie Goldberg on Punctuation

"A period was a heavy anchor for Philip, and he stopped and rested when he reached one. Punctuation had real significance. It signaled the beginning and end of thought.

'And if punctuation is about thought,' I thought, 'then in order to punctuate, we have to know our mind, to know what we think, and when one thought stops and the other begins. We have to understand the journey of thought, how thought moves around in our mind.'"

                          Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind


Tags: Natalie Goldberg, Punctuation, Wild Mind

                                                                         

One Little Comma Can Change Everything

For example:

half a cup of chopped walnuts

vs

half a cup of walnuts, chopped


These two amounts will be very different. In the first example, you would chop up a bunch of walnuts and from that pile you would measure out half a cup. That's a lot of walnuts.

In the second example, you would measure out a half cup of whole walnuts. Then you'd dump them on the cutting board and chop them up. That's a smaller amount of walnuts.

Punctuation and syntax - something we often ignore when we're rushing to get out an email, blog entry, or memo - totally affect what you're trying to say. If we want our communications to be precise and easy to follow, we have to pay attention to these "small" details. Just this one little comma can make or break the recipe!

(c)2014 Suzann Kale

                                                                                                           

  Tags:  punctuation, commas, syntax

Is it Poetry, or PowerPoint?

Lately I've seen a lot of weirdly placed capital letters. In memos, emails, and on websites - there will be a capital letter in the middle of of sentence for no reason. Another variation is a return in the middle of a sentence with a capital letter starting the new line. And sometimes strange returns.

Here are some examples - and it's like this weird plague that seems to be spreading:


Team Members:
Please remember to place your Umbrellas in the hall, not in the office. Yesterday we had
Someone fall because the office floor was slippery.

I've been trying to figure out why this is happening. Are we inadvertently using PowerPoint or headline styles? And are we forgetting to proofread stuff before sending it out?

When proofing your memo, remember that nouns are generally not capitalized in the middle of sentences. And watch out for Word auto-correcting by adding capital letters willy nilly.


(c)2014 Suzann Kale

Tags: PowerPoint, headline, styles, auto-correct, capital letters, proofreading, writing