Punctuation By David Kovarik

To be honest, I hate punctuation. I still have to look up when to use a semicolon versus a regular colon. To this end, I try to keep my writings and the works that I am editing as simple as possible. I always try to use a little punctuation as possible.  

In this day and age, it is a nuisance, a hindrance, and there are way too many people who don’t know how to use it. Of course for that instance, I am talking about texting, IMing, and social media. These mediums of communication are all about conveying as much as you can in as few words as possible. I think that it is only with the help of punctuation that this is possible. Texting is the most obvious example of how much scrutiny is needed when dealing with punctuation.

As part of the 20 and 30 year-olds that have grown up with cell phones, texting has become second nature, and I didn’t need a lesson on the usage of punctuation in texting. Older folks however, I think do. My mother, for example, had the annoying habit of using ellipsis to end her texts. For me, that means there is more to her text, or that she’s upset. For her, it didn’t mean anything, simply that there was a break in between the text and her next message (because she couldn’t fit it all in 160 characters). Texting conveys so much hidden meaning with so little actually being written.
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What’s interesting to me is how texting language has started to transfer into the writing styles of authors yet. I’ve never seen a “k.” in a book, or an proper novel that lacks punctuation all together, but the multiple exclamation points or question marks are starting to show up. I think it will be interesting to see if the writing style changes continue to follow the texting generation.