Posts by Tom Bentley

Today’s guest is business writer and editor Tom Bentley. Tom is a published journalist and essayist (300+ articles), and the author of a short story collection, Flowering and Other Stories, published last spring by AuthorMike Ink. His 1999 short story, All That Glitters, won the National Steinbeck Center’s short story contest, and he has won many other nonfiction and fiction awards and contests.  Check out his recent “Why I Write” post  on the popular Men With Pens blog. We were thrilled that Tom agreed to guest post with WU to talk about one of the writer’s most important (and most misunderstood) tools: punctuation. When we asked him why he wanted to write a post about punctuation, he said:

Because good punctuation has always made me emotional. And because BAD punctuation has always made me emotional. Also, I’ve heard that there’s a campaign to get rid of the apostrophe. These Bolsheviks must be hunted down! 

Follow Tom on his twitter @bentguy1 or his blog. Take it away, Tom!

Take a Punctuation Mark Out to Lunch

A comma, a period and a semicolon walk into a bar … oh, wait! I can’t finish the joke; I forget how it’s punctuated. Wow, tough crowd. But punctuation’s no joke, my friends—each punctuation mark has a grave (or acute) purpose: sometimes bearing a serious slant, sometimes swinging a strong, straight shoulder to torque the weight of words through thought rivers. Think of the cymbal crash of the exclamation point, the yearning intrigue of the question mark, the potential hidden menace of the semicolon.

But behind the sober, workaday faces of those little bits of pause and check, it’s not so black and white. Every punctuation mark has its own personality, much more idiosyncratic than that of a bland worker wielding the traffic signals of sentence flow. Like any of us, they appreciate the anonymity of a job well done, but at the same time, they don’t mind letting on that there’s a purple sash under the white cotton shirt.