I got so many good comments about favorite punctuation marks! Thank you all for weighing in.
One that stood out was from my friend Amanda (hi Amanda!) on Facebook.
I’ve learned to love the period. If I go back and make myself take out all my em dashes and semicolons, and replace them with periods, guess what. The end product is easier to read.
Amanda and I once edited the arts section of our college paper together, and we were very serious about it and you should take all of her punctuation opinions (as well as mine) very seriously.
But what I love about this is that she said something so eloquent about a punctuation mark that is so simple and so ubiquitous that most of us barely think about it. But the period is largely responsible for making writing easy to read, both “in your head,” as my 5-year-old calls it when I am reading for myself and not to him, and aloud.
And while there are all sorts of punctuation marks, like my fave, the em dash, as well as the semicolon and the parentheses — all of which received many mentions from y’all, and all of which I plan to emote about in future newsletters — that extend sentences and allow them to ramble, which is great when you’re reading, say, someone’s newsletter about grammar that is largely stream of consciousness.
But when you’re writing to be understood quickly, you need periods. In newspapers (print or digital), on TV, in marketing, in law, in business, you need periods. Short, snappy sentences and lots of periods. One of my biggest hurdles in journalistic writing has always been cutting my sentences down and paring out excessive punctuation. But the mark that gets added in when you do that paring is almost always the period.
So next time you’re writing something that other people need to read and understand, focus on the period, and count how many you have. Then look for sentences that need more of them. Add them in, shrink your sentences, take out other punctuation marks and excessive adjectives and adverbs, and see what happens!
Periods are also on my mind this week because Florida wants to ban discussion of them in elementary schools, to kids younger than age 11. Not the sentence kind (although they probably want to ban those too, because of the aforementioned making things easier to understand) but the kind that menstruating people experience. A lot of those people are young girls, a lot of them are not yet 11, and Florida doesn’t want them to talk about what they’re experiencing, or to be able to give or receive help with regard to them. Want to help them? Donate period supplies to a food bank or period pantry near you, or to an organization that will help put them in schools for free. Extra points if that organization is in Florida.
Needless to say, as someone who grew up on a steady diet of Judy Blume (and is going to see the movie version of “Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret,” tomorrow night OMG I cannot wait), and is also a graduate of a girls school that gave us free period stuff and all the room we ever needed to discuss them, I think this is something that needs way more discussion in public spaces, not less. So I’m donating some space here in my discourse on periods to encourage discussion of periods. Period.