Happy National Punctuation Day!

When I got an email from School Library Journal about National Punctuation Day I was way more excited than I really should have been. I mean, come on. A holiday dedicated to one of the geekiest parts of the writing process? How cool!

As a recovering grammar hater (I still have nightmares about diagramming sentences) I feel like I should be doubly respectful of the punctuation that differentiates my questions from my exclamation, my interruptions from my pauses, and my side notes from my unrelated thoughts. And so, in honor of National Punctuation Day, I’m going to let my grammar-geeky-self out and talk about my favorite punctuation marks.

Em Dash

I use em dashes. A lot. So much so that my first copy editor said, “The author seems exceedingly fond of em dashes.” It’s true, I won’t bother denying it. I use em dashes so much in my writing because, if my daily dialogue were close-captioned for all the world to read, my own speech would be full of em dashes. I talk in interrupted sentences—sometimes they’re interrupted by whole paragraphs—so it’s only natural that I write that way, too. Check out this example from OH. MY. GODS.:

We get to Serifos and spend a few glorious steps on an unmoving surface while Damian leads us to the chauffeured—is a private boat driver a chauffeur?—private yacht—yes, yacht—that will take us the rest of the way to the stupid, ferry-less island.

Ellipsis

I love ellipses almost as much as I love em dashes. (But only almost because, honestly, nothing can top my em dash love. Not even parentheses.) I love trailing off speech or thoughts, whether a character is doing it on purpose to torment another character or because some previously unrealized thought has just occurred and it’s so profound they can’t even finish what they were saying. Here’s another example from OH. MY. GODS.:

“Well,” Damian continues, “there is more to the Academy’s history than most textbooks contain. In the sixth century, the Roman emperor Justinian issued an edict demanding the Academy be closed and forbade formal philosophical education. The … ah-hem … benefactors of the school were not prepared to see it closed so they moved it here. To Serfopoula.”

I think the reason I like these two punctuation marks so much is because they allow me to control the pacing of my writing, to force beats and breaks where I think they would naturally occur. As a writer, I leave a lot of interpretation up to the reader. (Listening to the audiobook of OH. MY. GODS. I can hear just how very much is left up to interpretation.) Through em dash interruptions and ellipsis pauses, I can control—in some tiny way—how you read my writing. The rest is up to you.

Okay, so let your geek out. Do you have any favorite—or hated—punctuation marks? (I’ve always kind of disliked colons and semicolons. Probably because I don’t really understand how to use them, but the copy chief at my publisher said no one does so I don’t feel so bad about it.)

Btw, I’m kind of tempted to order the punctuation posters. If I were an English teacher they would so be on my wall!

Hugs,
TLC