The Humble Comma

In the day where technology is thriving, and the communication through email and text messages are now the common norm, there has been a steady decline and absence on the use of proper punctuation. The slow disappearance of punctuation standards, like commas and apostrophes, indicate the need for change towards the written world. Lynne Truss considers herself a stickler for punctuation, and her book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves addresses the minority of those who regard themselves as punctuation "sticklers" as well. Through the use of humor, figurative language such as relatable analogies and real life anecdotes, Lynne Truss creates a call to action for all the fellow punctuation sticklers: embrace proper punctuation, and require zero tolerance for those who use it incorrectly.

Directions: Identify whether each group of words is a PH (phrase) or a CL (clause).

The choice of diction and insertion of dialogue in each literary work supply them with distinct tones befitting of the authors’ particular purposes. While both Angelou and Alexie include colloquial dialogue in their works,

Punctuation is a major part of writing because it creates meaning within sentences. And John Irving uses it liberally. Throughout the book, many words

Please Note: Diction, detail, point of view, organization and syntax are all devices that the author uses to make the tone of the story evident to the reader. Your commentary should

Sometimes, when writing, we tend to focus on creating graceful and aesthetic sentences that, even though are very appealing, are not relevant to the point we are trying to make and only distract and discourage our reader. In “Beware the Trap of Bore-geous Writing”, Ayelet Waldman calls this “bore-geous” writing and describes it as the result of focusing on the beauty of our sentences, disregarding their significance in the whole writing (103). All sentences should play a specific role and contribute to support the point the writer is trying to make. She emphatically makes her case when she

His diction let’s you sense the carelessness and monotony of the characters lives. This style of writing shows the reader that the worth and value of the individual is not

Considering the importance of the literature work, in the following writing. Two literary attempts will be made to make a comparison and to highlight

Through the use of punctuation (or lack thereof), repetition, and rhyme scheme, John Clare 's first stanza of “I Am” expresses the speaker 's distorted sense of self and vast understanding of his morose existence. The following stanza has been chosen as the analysis point for this paper:

Another quality a writer should have in his or her paper is giving examples or things that the readers would find useful and use it themselves. In William Zinsser’s “The Act of Writing: One Man’s Method”  he gives a lot of information on writing a paper and how to improve my writing skills. He talks about “editing, cutting and revising” (166). The one that I use the most, after learning from him, is the bracket method. He says that, “The brackets might surround the little qualifiers… sentence that… repeats what the previous sentence…”(167). I use the brackets idea and it makes my essay a little better. It really helps me to see what I had already said in the other sentence, so I can change the sentence or delete it. Another writer that gives out good information is Lewis Thomas. In “Notes on Punctuation”, Thomas talks about all kinds of punctuation. He gives information on the parenthesis, semicolon, colon, dash, comma, exclamation and quotation marks. Before I read his essay I didn’t know what or how to use a

Effectively, his deliberate use of syntax creates a structure in his essay which immerses the reader into the passage and allows his message to be conveyed. Often in the essay, he adopts compound-complex sentence structures to maximize his level of description and to fully establish the imagery he intends to create. Moreover, when he establishes depictions of action, motion, and speed, he creates considerably longer compound-complex sentences; using five or more clauses and at least one dash to thoroughly depict action, to eliminate any sense of pause, and to fully intrigue his readers. Such a usage of syntax is also parallel to when he writes that “...it was filled with motion, speed.” His lack of “and” but rather the word “speed” preceding a comma further represents the elimination of a sense of pause and his use of syntax in order to create a sense of speed and intensity. In the last paragraph, he continues his extensive use of compound-complex sentences and he suddenly slows down and ends his final part on shorter complex sentences.

-Concrete subjects are used to convey abstract feelings. The bounded feet with “marks and callouses” and the “asymmetrical cropped hair” are representatives of two different cultures. This literature device makes the essay more vivid and encourages readers to think.

His writing style is poetic, fluctuating between short and concise to long, organic, and flowing sentence structures. For example, he utilizes short, concise sentence structures to imitate the quick fluttering of the hummingbird’s flying patterns: “Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird (273)”. In contrast to the short, concise sentences, he uses the opposite effect when describing the heart of the blue whale. Instead, he uses long sentences and traditional words that are separated by commas to force his readers to read slowly and deliberately: “. . . for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale (274).” He also uses other methods to evoke feeling from his readers.

This commentary will explore the use of vocabulary, punctuation and imagery by Milan Kundera in an extract of the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being . The passage to be analysed is located in the fourth part of the book named “Soul and Body”. It portrays a scene where one of the main characters, Tereza, is in front of a mirror and finds herself dealing with the conflict between identity and image. Her disconformities with her body act as a trigger for this questioning to arise and bring back memories from her childhood. The entire passage is structured in three sections: one where she criticises her body, another where queries arise from these observations and finally one where she demonstrates her definite opinion on the situation.

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.” (FCF 4).