This semester, I would like to focus on two main goals– one practical and the other more creative. The goals are: to build confidence in my use of commas, as I tend to go overboard and thus perpetually doubt my comma placement, and to explore creative options for punctuation such as colons, semicolons, and em dashes.
When I write, I tend to overuse commas. In fact, I may even be doing so right now, in this post. Truly, it is hard to tell. If anyone reading this can help me structure my sentences around punctuation other than commas, then by all means, help me! All jokes aside, I do actually want to branch out from my comfort zone and experiment with some new syntax. Aside from the more tongue-in-cheek examples of repetitive comma usage, another comes to mind. When emailing regarding a lost package, I struggled to keep the tone somewhere between friendly and formal. I ended up getting so nervous about my commas that I created an awkwardly long sentence with pauses in the wrong places: "I have two packages that I thought never arrived, but I was finally able to get info on them and it turns out they arrived a couple days earlier than predicted, before I had filled out the mailbox slip with my name." Though I didn't reconstruct the sentence before sending the email, I caught it when I was compelled by typo anxiety to read through again.
Stylistically, I'd like to work on my informal writing skills. My years of AP English classes and Standard English-focused education has led me to develop my formal and academic writing skills, but neglected my creative and more expressive skill development. My first genuine creative writing piece was assigned last year for my Queer Literature Studies class, in a fictionalized biographical paper. By challenging myself, I designed some impactful sentences wherein I got to use punctuation that I don't frequently get to use in academic writing. An example: "Consider this: a twelve year old girl. Any face, any name– the serials don't matter. She is riding home from a family potluck, a small and anticipatory dessert box in her lap." In the first few sentences of my piece, I used several punctuation types. It allowed me to hit the main bullet points of scene-setting that I needed to open my story. It also lent an air of impatience, I think, to have so many short and pointed sentences. I would love to experiment more with informal or unusual uses of grammar and punctuation, in order to build on my emotional tones in my creative writing.
Kenyah,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your few sentences from your Queer Lit class, and I do think you hit the mark on how to use punctuation and sentence structure to give the impression of impatience. In this class, know that you can experiment with using aspects of personal or creative writing in your academic writing if it fits with your rhetorical purpose. There's a lot of scholars in academia who do discuss their own personal stories in their writing as a way to support their points (often academics of color, queer academics, and women, all of whom at some point have been not welcomed into academia).
As for your commas, we will certainly go over the "rules" of when to use them. Most of the time you are doing fine, but you do seem to have a pattern of using them before a prepositional phrase, which is admittedly not conventional (or necessary). If you don't know what a prepositional phrase is yet, don't worry (just using the term so you can look at this later).
Thanks,
Beth