Punctuation and grammar in the 21st century

I’ve already eaten granny

Check out the headline above. Is your granny still alive and well?! Are you picking her out of your teeth — or did you just forget a comma?  

Punctuation drives everybody nuts. Perhaps you’re the type that carps about the Oxford comma or loathes an ellipsis…

Or maybe you can’t stand those people who go around putting apostrophes on street signs with a marker pen*.

Language — spoken and written — is ever-evolving, so isn’t it time to do away with all these annoying dots, notches and dashes?

I mean even science papers have exclamation points in them now!

No it isnt we cant and we wont if we want to be sure were completely understood. 

(You have no idea how much that sentence hurt me.)

Comma comedian

A recent study byResearchGate revealed that the most commonly misused punctuation mark is the humble comma. Where you position it can have quite an impact.

So where might you put commas in each of the following sentences? 

I LOVE TO COOK MY FAMILY AND MY DOG.

I HAD TO DRINK VOMIT AND LEAVE EMMA.

WE MUST PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM DAWN UNTIL DUSK.

Leaving these sentences unpunctuated is pretty brutal - for the fried family and poached pet Labrador, for Emma, forced to witness something that probably made her glad to be left, and for defamed Dawn, who has never done anything nasty to children at any time of day.

Alternatively, it’s just a list of happy pastimes, an explanation of a bad night out with the boys to the very patient Emma, and a bit of over-parenting.

Pedantic peril

For many of us a huge amount of communication now happens via the small screen in our palm and it would, of course, be pedantic to expect the same level of punctuation in a Tweet as in a first edition of Oliver Twist. 

Practically, we cannot put punctuation in hashtags and an apostrophe is a catastrophe in a URL.

Texts and personal messages make liberal use of thumbed-in shortcuts like RU OK? Cos I GTG soon. CU later, and why not? We’re in a hurry and it’s not an exam. LOL

What works for personal chat, though, doesn’t work for social posts.

Even so — do we need to hang on to all the old rules?

Over the past century we’ve noticeably streamlined our punctuation in most forms of published writing. Hence “Mr. T. J. Smith will arrive at 3.00 p.m. today.” has become ‘Mr TJ Smith will arrive at 3pm today.’. Which means Mr Smith’s onward adventures are now much easier to follow without the eye-snagging effect of quite so many dots.

And, crucially, the clarity is not lost. Where we can cut down on superfluous punctuation, we probably should.

So where does that leave those of us writing tweets, posts and video captions? In short -form media, clarity is even more important. Your sentences may be snappier and the word count tighter, but one stray comma or apostrophe can still spell disaster.

Worse, you will be judged. 

None of us should judge, of course, but we do. Your stellar, ground-breaking think piece should be above the nitpickers who noticed that you typed ‘your’ when you should have typed ‘you’re’. Sadly, your brilliance will still be diminished in the eyes of many by poor punctuation.

Here at The Content Engine our best advice is this:

Get someone else to read it before you post.

We do. Everyone gets their work checked, regardless of how senior or experienced, because punctuation blunders are just too easy to overlook - especially in your own work. If you want guidance on the most important things to scan for, here’s a parting checklist of common mistakes to stop the punctuation pedants right in their tracks. 

SIX OF THE WORST

1. Misplaced apostrophes. Tomato’s, potato’s, the swinging 60’s - all no-nos (not no-no’s)

2. Confusing its (belonging to it) and it’s (contraction of it is)

3. Extreme Use Of Capitals For No Apparent Reason

4. Excessive exclamation marks!!!!!

5. Using… ellipses… just…. too… often…

6. Dashing off — literally — too many — and we mean too many — dashes.

*Yes. That was me.