Miswritten

We put, all of us to-gether, such an emphasis on our:
punctuation. It must be just; so otherwise the sentences,
will be wrong despite! their meanings.” Is this-right?
Is it truly so terrible to have sentences that run on and do not stop for any reason not even the end of a line or the end of a page or anything like that even though the contents are just perfect?
Does it, devalue the sentence to have, commas placed incorrectly?
If you- dash the wrong things or- [use incorrect parentheticals) does that ruin the work?
How about the semicolon; that bastard’s never used well…
Punctuate! they say in mid-dleschool. Commas and conjunctions and Capital Letters they! cry
Must it alway’s be so?
Then, of course, we arrive in High School. Now it’s time for 12 point Times New Roman, double





spaced. Sources cited in MLA Format (Smith, 1923, p. 154) and indents and

paragraphs and magnanimous verbiage for the purposes of astonishing our beloved educationators...

And we’re not supposed to put ourselves into the paper, of course not. We are writers, and if we use the slightest little bit of informal language, if we make the just slightest hint towards the slippery slope to the concept that we may be humans, then, well, y’all teacher people just won’t be able to understand a thing, will ya? Clearly, format matters!

Will we deny the cure for all our ills if the writing is misdone?