Punctuation pooh-poohs

[cjsmith]

This? Is not grammatically correct.
Neither? Is this.
It makes prose? Sound whiny and ineffective.
When I do this? Somebody please kick my butt.

Almost every time I see an ellipsis... a comma would be better.
Commas indicate natural pauses in speaking... as this seems to be trying to do.
If it's meant to add emphasis... it's not working.
When I do this... somebody please kick my butt.

Comma splices are another one, each of these should be a sentence, it drives me crazy when I have to read it, I never know if the writer has a point in mind, in fact I usually start to figure they don't, I'm probably guilty of all three of these too sometimes, maybe I should have been a grade-school English teacher, this kind of thing really jumps out at me, when I do this somebody please kick my butt.

I feel better now.

Comments

[hnybny.livejournal.com]

I tend to overuse commas myself, but I hate using short sentences.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I probably overuse colons, semicolons, and parentheses. Sure, they're correct, but I could simplify. I suppose I perceive myself to be writing for an audience with a sophisticated reading comprehension level, so I don't bother simplifying. :-)

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I am a semi-colon fiend. I also have a nasty tendency to start sentences with conjunctions; this is merely a symptom of my greater tendency to explain everything by presenting a thought on one side of a debate, followed by a contradictory idea, followed by a situation in which the contradiction does not apply, followed by a disclaimer about why you should avoid those situations anyway, etc. This makes reading my writing quite similar to watching a tennis match, with all the back-and-forth-ing. It's a pain whether I do it within a sentence (as above) or on a larger scale.

Not to mention the hyphens, and the sentence fragments, and the parentheses....

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Definitely sentence fragments. All through my LiveJournal. I talk that way, too!

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

i use semicolons in text messages (:

(capitalisation, not so much)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Semicolons help me make winky-faces in text messages.