Projective Wonder: Imagine Us, the Swarm by Muriel Leung
The individual and the crowd might prove as false a binary as anything else, even that [perforated] line sketched between poetry and prose.
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Posts Tagged: punctuation
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar discusses his new collection, PILGRIM BELL.
...moreExclamation Points Are Feminist!
Friendly emails are a sign of progress, not weakness, in our working lives. Policing women’s use of language is over (we wish). But at the Huffington Post, Angelina Chapin argues that women’s use of exclamation marks in the workplace represents a subversion of masculinist notions about leadership.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with David Rivard
David Rivard discusses his new collection Standoff, writing as both a public and private act, the interiority of reading, and Pokémon GO.
...moreYou’d Prefer Not To
The Internet has been abuzz with grammatically incorrect chatter since the New York Times recently published an article heralding the end of the period. But Flavorwire’s Jonathon Sturgeon doesn’t expect that little dot to go anywhere anytime soon: Bilefsky’s piece — or any long piece without periods — is like a car without brakes. You […]
...moreThe Comma Splice: A Popular Short Story Blunder
At Electric Literature, Kelly Luce reflects on the patterns she noticed after reading for The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. Her observations range from recent literary magazine innovations to her frustrations with the “inordinate number” of comma splices in first sentences.
...moreThe Purpose of Punctuation
Artist Nicholas Rougeux focuses on the punctuation of famous works by removing all of the letters in a text and arranging the punctuation in a spiral around a central image. Rougeux speaks on the purpose of his work: Rougeux doesn’t have any bold claims for what his graphics reveal about literature, writing, “I’m not sure […]
...moreFor Everybody
…you ask them, ‘Why are you so upset?’, and they can’t answer you. For the New Yorker, Adrienne Raphael talks to linguist David Crystal about our age of abbreviation.
...moreThe Power of the Ellipses
The Guardian presents a history of this tantalizing punctuation. They’re irresistible…
...moreThe Srs Bsns of Writing Wryly
Sarcasm on the Internet—you know it when you see it. But how? Without the conversational aids of our best deadpan voices or our fingers as scare quotes, we use all sorts of tricks and mechanics. At The Toast, a linguist points out some of the ways in which we write out sarcasm on the Internet.
...moreWriting, Titling, Tricoloning
Greek for “of equal number of clauses,” isocolon is a rhetorical device that produces a sense of order by balancing parallel elements that are similar in structure and length within a sentence. An isocolon need not have three elements, but the requirement of parallel and balance means that it often takes a tripartite shape, technically […]
...moreAll the Exclaiming Ladies
The exclamation point doesn’t mean what you think it does anymore. At The Huffington Post, Maddie Crum explores the punctuation mark’s changing and increasingly gendered usage: instead of conveying strong emotion, the mark now connotes levity, and apparently women are far more likely to use it than men.
...moreSerial Commas, Subordinate Clauses, and the New Yorker
Mary Norris has a gift for your favorite grammarian in this week’s New Yorker: a detailed account of comma policy from a veteran copyeditor. The magazine is notorious for its meticulous house style (where else do you still see a diaeresis over the word coördinate?), which it owes to Mensa-level punctuator Eleanor Gould and her […]
...moreA Parenthetical Suffering
According to Christopher Benfey, literature has a long history of writers including characters’ personal struggles in parentheses within the text. To learn how that worked in Nabokov’s “Lolita” or Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” (and to discover that there’s an entire study on the subject), check out Benfey’s essay on the New York Review of Books‘s blog.
...moreThe Decline of Punctuation?!…
We live in a heyday of punctuation. “Call this what you will—exclamatory excess, punctuation inflation, the result of the Internet’s limitless expanse—it is everywhere,” writes Megan Garber at the Atlantic. But perhaps not for long—with the rise of image-based expression like emoji and gifs, we are finding new ways to express ourselves, and we’re leaving […]
...moreThe Pleasure of Perfectly Positioned Punctuation
As conscientious writers know, punctuation can make all the difference in a sentence, sculpting mush into meaning or cluing the reader in to nuances of intonation. Vulture’s Kathryn Schulz has compiled some of literature’s most effective and memorable instances of punctuation, from Nabokov’s parenthetical “(picnic, lightning)” to the ellipses in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love […]
...moreA Period in the Age of Texting
As we consider the limits of English punctuation, we should also consider the place of the period. According to Ben Crair at The New Republic, the period no longer signifies a neutral end to a sentence, but in the age of texting and social media, it has come to signal anger. Through a series of conversations, […]
...moreThe Punctuation Problem
We didn’t know there was one until Slate‘s Matthew Malady pointed out the limitations of English punctuation. Look, I’m the last one to encourage the excessive use of exclamation points. But if we are going to use them—and they do come in handy from time to time—we should at least do so in a way […]
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