How do I fix my (stupid) use of excessive punctuation?
In online forums I use far too many punctuation marks. I especially use dashes - to separate clauses that don't need a dash (and sometimes I'll add brackets like this because, well, I dunno). And sometimes I'll start a sentence with "and" when it doesn't need to be there. My comma use is wild and uncontrolled, but I feel it's a bit more controlled than these other marks.
Importantly: I do not care how other people use punctuation.
But I would like to try to fix, or perhaps just improve, my punctuation use. Like the way I just start a new paragraph at random.
I feel like my posts are the same as those flyers that use 7 different fonts, with bolds and underlines and italics (and combinations of them), and with some words in red and some in green and some in black and there's no rhyme or reason to it.
I do like a casual tone but I feel that I go far too far in the informal direction. English is my first, and my only, language. (I love Europe, but I am a bad European. "Please look after our star" we said, and most of us said it in English because most of us who said it don't know other European languages)
Do you have any advice? I'd be interested to hear about books, or videos, or courses, or podcasts, or anything at all that can help. I'd even pay for this. But not Eats Shoots and Leaves please
Your comment gives me a lot of peace; reading this post was like looking in a mirror! I am now reassured and completely unrepentant, so I hope OP is too. :)
The semi-colon is the punctuation equivalent of a having a huge crush but you know they're way out of your league so you never shoot your shot.
Thank you for the wisdom drop. I'm more of an exclamation mark guy anyway; I did marry one after all!
Agree with what he said. I realized at some point that the way I tend to write is overly and/or oddly punctuated - but generally, it's to convey the information in the way I would speak it. I use too many commas, I love a semicolon, etc, and that's just how I think and communicate. So fuck it eh.
My advice is to write shorter sentences. There’s nothing wrong with writing simple declarative sentences. I used to overuse dashes and most of the time these could be replaced with two sentences.
Another observation is that paragraphs naturally collect ideas together, and have a conventional form that walks a reader through that collection. If you learn and leverage this, you won’t need to explicitly string everything together with punctuation.
As for books, I recommend the classic Strunk & White: Elements of Style. It’s also a fun read for how snooty the authors are about the whole subject.
Good writing is subjective, and like the other replies here I'd argue that your use of punctuation is not jarring. There are rules for some of these things, and sometimes it's worthwhile to break the rules for the sake of readability, style, or tone.
There is an inappropriate comma habit that I know bothers a lot of English snobs, and that's the use of a comma wherever one may pause when speaking aloud, usually for emphasis. You don't seem to be doing this.
Parentheticals are fine either comma spliced or with actual parentheses. Semicolons should only be used to join two independent clauses (phrases with a subject and a verb that could be complete sentences on their own). Commas with conjunctions should be used the same way as semicolons, to join independent clauses.
Irksome to me personally is bad apostrophe use. Remember that unless designation possession (eg This is Lily's turd) an apostrophe indicates a contraction. Most often bungled with its vs it's, where the latter means only "it is".
Beginning sentences with conjunctions is a style choice that I don't frown upon. I am also find ending a sentence with prepositions. English professors may tell you not to do this, but it's worthwhile to avoid some really contrived constructions. And sometimes it just feels right to begin with a conjunction, like when semicolons feel too precocious but you want to connect the clauses.
In grad school (math, not any language stuff) I got pretty nerdy with my writing. I fell in love with the style guide The Complete Plain Words and developed some of my own tastes. Today when advising folks on good mathematical writing I tell them: first be correct, then be clear, and finally be brief. Correctness, clarity, and brevity are the priorities, and in that order.
Sorry if I'm rambling. This is stuff I think about a lot, and very few people ever wanna talk about it in my current job.
Have you used the Hemingway Editor at all? It will analyze your text and flag things that could be simpler or shorter. It's not perfect, and some of the most beautiful English writing will get a poor score in their system, but it is a quick way to get feedback about which parts of your writing could be simplified.
[Edit to add that I don't think you need to do this. Your writing is fine, but I understand the desire to be more concise sometimes.]
I don't even understand why those example sentences are flagged on the homepage. They seem pretty simple to me.
I think it's a very naive test of whether the sentence could be several shorter sentences. I think it's the wrong tool for a novel or a poem but can be helpful for a technical manual or a magazine advertisement.
Even then, I've just tried it out on some of my own writing and I'm not convinced (although obviously I'm biased there...) It seems to roughly search out any sentence that has a clause in it, but clauses aid comprehension by joining concepts together that belong together. The last sentence is a good example: it would be less clear and more verbose as two separate sentences.
I suspect this would be most useful as a first pass for an experienced writer who is able to use it to highlight points where they might want to double-check their writing. But I wouldn't want Hemingway-the-tool's writing style to become the standard, even in technical manuals or articles.
I mean, yeah, it thinks Trump's inaugural speech is better than the Gettysburg Address and that 50 Shades of Grey has a better opening than A Tale of Two Cities. It's not a tool for good writing, it's a tool for simple writing.
If you want to give your writing a better flow, my go-to advice is to read Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. It starts out with the most basic ("branch to the right") and grows steadily more advanced. Also, try reading books with language you want to emulate. There's lots of writing online, of course, but I think most of it is sort of terrible. So books is likely a better choice.
The prose can get a more dynamic rhythm with literary devices such as Resumptive Modifier ("Gulash was served, gulash bought at the temple"), Summative Modifier ("There were a goat, a pig and a walrus—three animals that weren’t cats") or Anaphora ("a pair of eyes watched her as she awaited her trains arrival, watched her as she boarded, watched her as she sat") but such frivolious word-smithery is not without its risk; since the zeitgeist today calls for clean, destilled writing, one can easily be judged as being a bit too showy. If people say you're writing "purple prose", this is absolutely not a compliment. (yeah, I tried playing around with the rhythm of my writing here, in case you didn't notice.)
I had never heard of right branching sentences, so I had to go look it up. This video did a good job of concisely explaining it. Fascinating idea.
You've asked for advice on revising your punctuation and style. Others have offered formal style guides. Speaking as someone whose writing passed through the formalisms and jargonistic stylings of science, engineering, law, medicine, cuisine, and technology, I think it's best to emphasize expressing your thoughts in online fora. As /u/simplify eloquently said, "Just keep being you and don't worry."
For purposes of online discussion, I'd revise /u/inganillo's priorities as correctness, clarity, originality, personality, and brevity. We're writing for each other in the present. We're not writing for an anonymous, judging posterity. You're not addressing an audience of grammarians. It helps to think of your best audience as people who value a connection to the writer as much as the writing. There will always be nitpickers, but they're generally seeking satisfactions that don't involve understanding you.
Your style is distinctive and convivial, not hopelessly idiosyncratic or haphazard. I had no difficulty parsing your meaning above, and I generally enjoy your writing on Tildes. [Note that I'm not averse to parens, brackets, and dashes myself - they're convenient textual subroutines to declare tangentially related thoughts without starting a full new paragraph.]
There are practical considerations as well. If choosing the perfect words and punctuation cuts into limited time to get your meaning across, be meaningful first. If you've only got a paragraph of space for an essay's worth of ideas, then use all the symbols available for compression.
And now I'm out of time! I hope this gives you some reassurance that you're doing a fine job without needing a straitjacket of punctuation rules.
You want to use an em dash and not a hyphen—much better legibility. Long press the hyphen on iOS, MacOS is option+shift+hypen for em dash (just option for en dash).
Excessive commas I’ve heard can be a side effect of ADHD. I think being aware of it helps reduce over usage. I’ll reread what I wrote to see if I can cut down on punctuation. For formal writings I’ll edit it no sooner than the next day so I can proofread with fresh eyes.
Your punctuation use is fine -- it's following the rules and is unobtrusive. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with your overall writing style either, but if you want to make it sound less formal, split up your sentences more. When you have a large sentence with a lot of clauses joined together, consider making it multiple shorter sentences.
But overall I wouldn't worry too much. Your writing is not so convoluted as to be confusing or misleading or even particularly difficult to read.
My advice would be just to take more time to edit your typing and remove the items you wish to remove. Be your own editor.
Jot everything down. Then rearrange for clarity.
I've run into the parenthetical thing before, and simply took some time to think about how to restructure the words to remove that part.
I think too many of them can throw people off track of what you're trying to convey. That is, too many asides can be confusing.
It all comes down to how much time you want to put into crafting the response to elicit the emotions you want out of the reader. You can write quickly (stream of consciousness) and be done with it. Or you can take your time, get your thoughts down, and rearrange to communicate in an intentional way.
By the way, it's entirely possible the stream of consciousness style is what you intend in some instances, which can work just fine.
Personally I think you communicate well enough if this message means anything. I will offer a tip though as someone who also occasionally gets stuck on putting commas everywhere. Just go delete a few and force yourself to read it the new cadence, instead of the way it sounded in your head. If it doesn't come off much different, there you go, less commas. Doing that for a while might clue you in to when you really do want to have those commas, and then your approach has been honed in some small way.
I have the same problem; I feel like I can't fully explain myself without a near-constant stream of clauses to cover every nuance of my position. But then if I try to break them down into shorter sentences it seems choppy and childish to me. I talk the same way and I know it annoys people but I feel like I have to cover every detail so people don't misunderstand me or think I haven't considered an important point.
I've heard this is a common ADHD thing and I am also very guilty of it. Supposedly it's a way to convert the way we speak into writing. When I talk, I add in info I see as necessary to provide additional context to the focus statement. I saw a dog (the golden retreiver that lives next door) attack a pigeon (the one that shits on my car). If I'm going to share my own take or feeling on the situation those details might help provide clarity to why I feel the way I do (I like the dog and I'm frustrated about the shit on my car). To say all of that more succinctly:
You provide additional context to be better understood.
I constantly overdo my punctuation also- especially parentheses. But it is how my brain functions when typing things out. (I noticed another comment mentioning ADHD being related, and while I am not diagnosed officially- this and many other things about it match me so it's possible I have it- honestly a lot of things in my life make a ton of sense if I do).
I hear what I'm typing being narrated in my head and I end up interpreting that conversational speak into what I type, including punctuation. Some of it may break grammatical rules or whatnot but so far I've just gotten comfortable with it and I only clean it up more if it's a special situation where I think it's potentially necessary. Otherwise I think it helps me not to fight it in most situations, as it's the best way for me to get the words in my head out.
Oh, I'm the same with parenthesis (just see my comment below). And the ADHD thing would kinda make sense if I was diagnosed (but I would not be surprised if I had it honestly either). Curious, does ADHD explain also constantly going back and re editing your comment? cause I do that a lot too (did it to this one for this comment).
Not sure- but that's also something I do a lot. Not necessarily for punctuation reasons, but I constantly think of things I forgot to say, or a better way to say something, and I can't help but re-edit my original post over and over until I'm satisfied.
You, can avoid, excessive use of commas, by not watching, performances, by, William Shatner.
I agree with others, based on this post it's not something that is necessary. But if you want to change the way you write anyway I would recommend reading what you wrote after its finished and editing it. Use a list of things you want to change (mental, physical or digital) and simply rewrite according to your wishes.
Honestly, I don't know but I'll say I have a similar problem as you, except it's mostly with over use of parenthesis. One thing I do is I try to reread stuff and if I find that the sentence I put in parenthesis is too long I redo it a bit to remove the parenthesis. Hell... I'm amazed I didn't use parenthesis in this response (i've <- oh look, I did it and no I didn't do that on purpose, I just caught myself doing it and decided to point it out. And yes, I've done this before when I was talking about my problem with over using them lol). <- also, this is where I would normally edit it and remove the parenthesis but I'm leaving it in this time to make my ponit.
As a writer of fiction, I've gotten used to getting rid of most parenthesis. On tildes, since I'm writing casually and not editing my comments or anything, you can probably tell whether I'm currently writing a story or not because my parenthesis come back, along with several other bad habits.
Depending on the length and context of the parenthesized expression, these can usually (and quite easily!) become their own sentence or be replaced by emdashes. Commas are also a possiblity, though I wouldn't recommend it in mid-sentence.
Depending on the length of the parenthesized expression, these can usually--and quite easily!--become their own sentence or be replaced by emdashes.
For the OP: I don't see the use of short sentences as a bad habit. I'm not a native english speaker, or academically trained, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but I think conveying cadence through writing is a good thing. It adds context (tone) to what's being said. People usually prefer reading text with mostly short sentences. Longer sentences should be used sparsely and carefully: At least in fiction, you don't want the reader's brain to snag on the words and the syntax. You want to create a smooth reading experience.
or
These snippets have distinct cadences. Neither is wrong--it's about your intention as the writer.