So you think punctuation is unnecessary in texts and on social media? Maybe you’re right. But have you considered that maybe we shouldn’t undo centuries of English language evolution and snail-paced fine-tuning just because today’s technology employs some arbitrary character limit in which you can’t afford to waste valuable characters to commas or periods. Well looky there, not a single comma in that last sentence—or period here↙
And many people will complain about the vast number of style guides—Chicago Manual of Style, APA style, MLA, etc.—that make rulings about what is or is not the correct way to write given the format; these guides will often have separate formats for journalism-based writing such as magazines, versus the overall format for manuscripts (ie. novels, short-stories), and other differences too vast to list, such as all having their own preferred methods for citations and references, as well as individual nuances across the plethora of minutia like capitalization, or number and date formatting (to only crack the proverbial egg of the matter), all this undermined to a much vaster extent by the lay folk—you and me and likely every person in your phone’s Contact list—the folk who hotly debate—whether out loud with a spouse,through texts and tweets via their laptops, tablets, or mobile devices, or via an ongoing, silent yet omnipresent internal debate—some of the heavy topics in grammar, including: whether a possessive word ending in “s” simply needs an apostrophe hung after the “s,” or it requires another “s” tacked on just beyond that apostrophe; the debate about single- or double-spacing after a period when typing standard prose; use of certain punctuation inside versus outside of quotation marks, differing depending on your side of the pond; when, why, and how to use a dash mark (honestly, does anyone really know?!); use of the Oxford comma—as in the previous clause—1 like if there needs be the comma after “why” or not; starting sentences with conjunctions2; ending a sentence with a preposition or forcing its reconstruction with the awkwardly placed “whom,” “which”3 or other forced ridiculousness; the persistent splitting infinitives debate (if “to boldly go where no man has gone before” is good enough to elegantly work for Star Trek . . .); use of adverbs absolutely never, on those very rare occasions for emphasis, here-and-there-but-not-everywhere, or frequently and dutifully; converting every “her/him, (s)he” to gender neutral pronouns “them/they,” respectively; etc . . .
Try reading that cluster-£√¢Ж of a sentence without punctuation!!
You know what? Maybe you’ll find this easier to comprehend.
There are three basic types of dashes the standard dash also known as the hyphen the en dash and the em dash each of which differ in length the shortest being the hyphen intermediate being the en dash leaving the longest as the em dash and in proper usage which many people even some professional writers I would argue from reading I have done have either not bothered learning or simply do not care to properly utilize in their chosen profession a profession one would argue necessitates such baseline knowledge despite the breadth of creative options they allow inclusive but not limited to creating a conversational tone ease and consistency of formatting separating clauses when another set of commas would become too unruly or confusing etc thus I would and do highly recommend diligent study and employment of liberal use to give that extra spice to your future writing.
But to be fair, unless you’re reading David Foster Wallace4, or the likes of James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy5, sentence structure and punctuation are not going to be of the absurdly ridiculous levels demonstrated above. As to whether a text to a friend needs punctuation . . . I’d say that’s a two-way street for the conversationalists. Just make sure you both know which side of the road is which, or things may not go as smoothly as Sweden’s Dagen H6.
Take all this for what you will, remembering it was written by the guy who wrote the very words you’re reading. Wow, that sentence was more obvious than the obligation to have a formal commencement to celebrate high school or college graduation. Maybe I can say it better with an analogy: it’s like asking a fish how the water is today. Punctuation is what the writer knows: the period & comma, colon & semi colon, en dash & em dash. To a writer, these marks are inseparable from the words, just as a fish is inseparable from the water7.
So, you still think punctuation is unnecessary in texts and tweets? I’m not the right person to ask. Hell, I try to text as little as possible. So, I guess, yeah, come to think of it . . . You’re Probably Right.
1: Hey, that was a pretty good use of the em dash, if I do say so myself.
2: See the beginning of this sentence/paragraph.
3: No Oxford comma. Which are you preferential to? Sorry . . . to which are you preferential?
4: I highly recommend investing some time in Infinite Jesta. Took me just shy of a year.
5: Never read either fella myself, but Google says they’re a bitch to read.
6: Google it. You’ll gain an appreciation for the driving references.
7: Like that analogy? It’s from Infinite Jest!
a: If you don’t like these footnotes, though, stay far away from D.F.W.
[002] July 22, 2020