on Writing Forward:

What is it about punctuation marks that cause so many bad sentence constructions?

You know the sentences I’m talking about. They’ve got random commas, missing quotation marks, and way too many exclamation points.

To make matters worse, some writers break the rules and get away with it while others are chastised for doing (what appears to be) the same thing.

E.E. Cummings ignored most of the rules and made up a few of of his own, and now his poetry is studied in universities. Cormac McCarthy didn’t use quotation marks with the dialogue in his novel, and he won a Pulitzer Prize.

And then there’s the internet. Now everyone’s a writer with a blog and a bunch of social media profiles. Bad grammar and badly placed punctuation marks have become rampant.

Common Mistakes with Punctuation Marks

Typos are one thing. Not knowing the correct way to write a sentence is another thing. But blatantly misplacing or misusing punctuation marks is just plain reckless.

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