Grammar and Punctuation: Questions, Answers, and Resources

Here’s a resource that changed my writing by showing me how to interrupt text with various dashes.

https://www.touchstone-editing.com/2017/10/mini-lesson-punctuating-interrupted.html

Posted by: @lost_bard

This is a thread for posting questions, answers, and resources about grammar and punctuation. Digging through the forum, I found a lot of great discussions about these building blocks of our craft, but no consolidated place to consult when a question strikes, so I decided to build it! Below are some of the discussions I found on the forum. Please add more!

Onomatopoeia (Sound Effects) in Writing

The Hyphen, En Dash, and Em Dash

Accents, Diacritics, and Pinyin

Italics for Emphasis

Commas in Dialogue

Formatting Internal Dialogue

Commonly Misspelled Words

This is awesome, because em dashes and I — we have a thang.

@morgan-broadhead Stay away—She’s mine! All mine!

Omgosh, you guys. I may have just found my happy place in this thread! 😊

Ask me all the questions, please! Then, I can learn also when looking them up.

Now--takes out pencil, licks the lead--who needs to know what about em-dashes? (I love them!)

This came in my mail today. Yes, I am a huge word nerd. (I consider this fun reading!) hehe

~A.

Omgosh, you guys. I may have just found my happy place in this thread! 😊

Ask me all the questions, please! Then, I can learn also when looking them up.

Now--takes out pencil, licks the lead--who needs to know what about em-dashes? (I love them!)

This came in my mail today. Yes, I am a huge word nerd. (I consider this fun reading!) hehe

~A.

I am currently reading A Dash of Style and really like the way it talks not just about the rules but about how they get stretched/broken and discusses overuse and underuse. Plus it has a bunch of exercises.

My plan is to read it again about a month after this first read through - after having used some of what I learned for a while. I think that will help me to finally get my brain around all the punctuation stuff that stumbles me now.

@czing 

Hmmm, just added that to my book list. Thanks!

You know one of my favourite things about reading A Dash of Style right now is that the novel I'm drafting features three different timelines for the same character. One when she is the equivalent of early teens, another where she is late teens and after some very huge life altering events, and the third where she is the equivalent of her late twenties (after even more huge life altering events). 

The book is giving me great ideas about how I can bring out the difference in her as a person in these different stages of her life though the considered use of punctuation. Of course most of that will be done during editing after I have more time to let the book's concepts percolate (and probably after a second reading).

Knowing this has helped me keep going with the drafting of new content (which I have found hard over the last couple years). So maybe after I finish A Dash of Style I need to find another craft book to keep me chugging along. Maybe one on structure since that is something I know I need to spend more active mental effort on at some point.