A Punctuation Lover's Lament

I love proper punctuation. That’s not to say I never make mistakes, but I straight up love punctuation. It makes me gleeful to get commas in the right places or use a semicolon properly, and I’m filled with joy when someone actually cares to learn, say, the best way to punctuate an adjective clause.

Luckily, my job as an ESL teacher affords me lots of opportunities to talk about punctuation and its relative, grammar—another love of mine. Because my students are learning English, they make many mistakes, but all of those mistakes are forgivable (unless it is a lesson I just taught). Their errors don’t fill me with dismay because we’re working on them and because it’s not like my students have been using English their entire lives.

No, it’s the mistakes I see native speakers make that drive me to distraction. Now, before any of us go off pointing fingers about who’s a prescriptivist or an elitist or what-have-you, let me be clear that I do understand that there are different modes of writing. A dashed-off text message to your BFF doesn’t necessarily require perfect punctuation or spelling, and some people might consider punctuation errors perfectly acceptable in a Facebook post. (I don’t consider them acceptable, but being human, I do make them.)  I also understand there are competing philosophies of punctuation (Oxford comma, anyone?) as well as situations when it is a writer’s call. A comma might be allowed but not required, for example.

That said, I believe that there need to be lines. We need to have clearly delineated spaces where screwy punctuation is a no-no and where people take pains to do things in a more by-the-book manner. For me, it demonstrates respect—respect of self and audience—to take the time and make the effort to punctuate properly. It’s a way a writer shows that what she is saying matters and that her audience matters. Proper punctuation isn’t necessary at all times or in all venues, but there need to be spaces where we take the time to sweat the small stuff.

I can think of no clearer space than large, well-respected media outlets. I am driven to distraction by the shoddy work I see on daily display in some of the nation’s most well-known media outlets. While it is true that you rarely see egregious errors in the print forms of The New York Times or The Washington Post, you don’t always need to look hard to find them in the online forms of those publications or of countless others.

You might wonder why punctuation errors in those esteemed sources bother me so much, and I have an answer: Many people don’t get any formal education on proper punctuation, usage, or grammar. In lots of schools, these subjects aren’t taught, whether because other educational needs are more pressing or because the teachers simply don’t understand how to punctuate because they weren’t taught or were taught incorrectly.

When we aren’t taught in a formal way how to punctuate, how do we learn?  Well, we learn by reading. We see what others do, and we mimic it. Based on what we’ve seen, we use logic to deduce the rules for specific cases we haven’t seen. It’s basically how we acquire language as children; only, in this case, we are acquiring rules for periods, commas, and the like. Now, I think most of us—even teenagers—know that we shouldn’t be trusting some dipstick comment on Facebook to guide our punctuation in a cover letter, but I do feel like we should be able to trust nationally-recognized media outlets to have a grasp of punctuation after which we can model our own writing. These days, however, that is true less and less.

I’ve probably spent too much time wondering about why this is the case. In my more pessimistic moods, I’d just say that the world has gone to hell, and when no cares to get facts right consistently, how can anyone be expected to avoid comma splices? Besides, most people won’t notice—the aforementioned lack of formal education on the topic or else the speed with which we consume—or won’t care. After all, when ISIS is burning people alive, a misplaced comma seems a lot less civilization-destroying.

A more practical explanation for the decline in proper punctuation in The New York Times or The Washington Post is money. Newspapers and magazines are working on shoestring budgets and cutting jobs like cutting jobs is their job. If you have to choose between a copyeditor and a reporter, you are probably going to keep the reporter. That makes sense even to me, the girl who dreams of fixing mistakes for a living. When you don’t have enough people working so that you can check every comma, mistakes are bound to happen, even to people who love commas.

Time is another thing in short supply. We live in a 24/7 world. Everything is all the time. (A strange sentence, but that is what I mean.) In the past, I never would have sent an email to a professor or professional colleague at 2AM. I’d have worried what they’d think of me and my priorities and time-management skills. What’s more, I’d have been similarly worried about their priorities and time-management skills if I received a middle-of-the-night missive. Nowadays, though, it’s nothing to get an email from your shrink at 3:35AM asking if you can move your Friday appointment back by half an hour. That has actually happened to me. Well, more or less.

In this 24/7 world, you get more credit for being first (or being the first to catch on and trend) than you do for getting your facts correct, and if your information doesn’t need to be correct, then clearly your punctuation doesn’t either. The priority is turnaround time. You need it faster than everyone else, and apparently, proper punctuation is an impediment. All those dots and squiggles gum up the works.

Another part of this economy is needing more. Quantity is the thing. We need more articles and lists and pictures and words. A media empire that relies on ads for revenue needs eyes on its webpages, and the more content that is out there in the digital world, the greater the chance that someone will click on it. With fewer employees churning out more content, no one can afford to waste time making sure the punctuation perfect. Besides, even if some people stop reading an article because it has too many errors, I’m pretty sure that won’t matter for the pageview stats.

In the 24/7 digital economy, there’s no real penalty for making a punctuation mistake, and anyway, most people are going to forget the poorly punctuated article as soon as they are looking at another one. If they remember a single thing about what was written, it is very unlikely that what they will remember is a mistaken use of hyphens or a forgotten apostrophe.

In a world whose focus is newer-faster-more, there’s less of a concern with small—some, not me, might even say petty—details, and punctuation is absolutely a detail. I would argue, though, that it is a detail that matters. Proper punctuation tells your readers that you’ve thought about what you are writing, that you’ve taken time to shape it and craft it. It also demonstrates a respect for them because punctuation that is done well makes writing clearer and easier to understand. It helps a reader know what is important and what’s less so. It gives a sense of beginnings and endings.

And lest I seem like too much of a prig, a stick-in-the-mud, a goody-two-shoes, or a teacher’s pet, you should know that one of my primary attachments to rules is the joy and freedom of breaking them.