Verbal traffic controls

Disclosure: I am a confessed grammar scofflaw, which sometimes riles editors. In a feature article, I once used the phrase, "...it was her." The grammar checkers tried to pin me down and make me change it to "...it was she."

I wrote back, quoting chapter and verse in my defense. And I added: "Please don't make me sound like my 5th grade English teacher..... It's perfectly acceptable to say 'It was her.' Send the grammar police to me if they have complaints."

So, you can see I'm no purist. Still, after rereading an ambiguous sentence a few times, I did ask one of my favorite writers about his cavalier attitude to punctuation.

He replied:

When passing a punctuation stop sign or running a syntactical red light, I will flash my poetic license, which if it ever lapsed, I hereby declare renewed.

I answered him,

When it comes to verbal traffic controls, I keep one rule in mind:

WATCH FOR PEDESTRIANS

Pity the poor pedestrian readers. Make it safe and easy to keep reading to the next page, and the next, and the next.......

Comma Clash

Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, was notorious for carpet bombing the copy with commas. James Thurber fought valiantly for readability over correctness. But Ross was the boss. And the commas continued.

This is not to say that Thurber championed sloppy language. On the contrary, he said,

Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

Gracie Allen may have put it best, "Never place a period where God has placed a comma."

An ongoing discussion in LinkedIn's LinkEds & writers group: "Commas used in a series; has something changed?" has some members crying for a period. Enough already.

I offered my own humble opinion, but the battle rages on.

While many of us wish the Wicked Wolf would have spared Grandma and eaten Grammar, there is no denying the importance of proper punctuation. It is so important that the great Victor Borge invented a method of making speech as clear as writing by adding visual cues. He called it "Phonetic Punctuation."