The little dots and dashes in the English Language, called the punctuation, can go a long way in making clear or distorting your message. it can make the difference between a yes and a no. Wrongly placed and it can make the meaning of what you meant totally the opposite of what you actually meant. I am reminded of a story related to this.
An English teacher was conducting a class on punctuation. As an exercise in the topic, she asked her students to punctuate the following sentence as they deemed fit – A woman without her man is a savage
The boys in the class did this:
A woman, without her man, is a savage
The girls of the class went:
A woman, without her, man is a savage
Just a tiny comma changed the way the genders perceived their relationship with each other. I wanted this to be a short post as a reminder about how basics never go out of fashion. We may write stories or novels – the basic building blocks of language, like words and punctuation marks, don’t change.
To read the long post on Punctuation, see Is Punctuation Obsolete?
For series on vocabulary building, see How to build your vocabulary in 4 steps