Does the title of this thread bother anyone else?
I have just finished reading Lynne Truss's book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," a book about the history and bleak future of punctuation. A glance through the various threads on this website, or any website for that matter, suggests that most people have not.
According to Truss, the dawn of the "netspeak" age followed a tragic trend in Language Arts education, a trend that continues in Canadian and American schools today. Punctuation is not taught in a rote manner; rather, students are expected to learn punctuation rules through the context of reading and writing. This was supposed to foster creativity and constructivist learning: it hasn't.
How many of you bother to punctuate replies, text-messages, or emails? If you don't bother, why not? Do you think that punctuation has lost its purpose, or is it out of laziness that the convention is suffering? For those of you in university, have you found that years of internet-related punctuation neglect is causing you trouble in your papers (if you don't use it, you lose it)? And finally, can you reply to this thread without using an emoticon?
I have just finished reading Lynne Truss's book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," a book about the history and bleak future of punctuation. A glance through the various threads on this website, or any website for that matter, suggests that most people have not.
According to Truss, the dawn of the "netspeak" age followed a tragic trend in Language Arts education, a trend that continues in Canadian and American schools today. Punctuation is not taught in a rote manner; rather, students are expected to learn punctuation rules through the context of reading and writing. This was supposed to foster creativity and constructivist learning: it hasn't.
How many of you bother to punctuate replies, text-messages, or emails? If you don't bother, why not? Do you think that punctuation has lost its purpose, or is it out of laziness that the convention is suffering? For those of you in university, have you found that years of internet-related punctuation neglect is causing you trouble in your papers (if you don't use it, you lose it)? And finally, can you reply to this thread without using an emoticon?