Shoot Me

In my last posting, I mentioned how much of my work entails writing. In a manner somewhat similar to how I view building construction, I think that sentence structure and composition should follow established rules. I think this curiosity might has started with the 'by the book' teachers I had in elementary school who taught us how to diagram sentences. It was all very structural. Looking at subject and predicate, parts of speech, modifiers and all that stuff was great fun. Yes - now you can see the inner nerd.

Later, there came a growing fascination with how proper punctuation makes more order out of the potential mess of throwing words together. On this subject, there is no better reference than Eats, Shoots & Leaves, the wonderful book by Lynne Truss. Her extended title, The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is apt.

An interesting aspect of all this analysis is that I eventually came to realize that if you want to write in a manner that is conversational, you have to ignore the rules. Imperfect sentence formation, use of jargon, bad grammar, you name it - they're all part of the game. The old biddies at Old Tappan Elementary School would be aghast. Me - I just stumble along. Okay, please don't shoot me.