Welcome to Gaia! ::

*Begin flash back....*

"Ah, what a wonderful day to look at all the new threads in the ED!

(insert intelligent sounding thread title here)? Ah, good, intelligent discussion!"

*looks in thread*

*is met with something along the lines of this:

do you think global warming is caused by the hole in the ozone because i do cuse my friend showed me a map with this huge hole in the atmospher on it and was like wow that is a big hole! then i looked around and found more maps and a digram which showed how the hole in the ozone has gotten biger over time i think this is a huge problem because the extra radiation makes it easier to get skin cancer and.....*

eek

*.... End flash back*

So, why don't people use punctuation anymore? Do they not realize that the placement of punctuation can actually effect the meaning of the sentence? Observe: (note: this was the only thing I could think of at the moment)

A woman, without her man, is nothing.

A woman, without her, man is nothing.

I have seen countless potentially good arguments destroyed by a lack of punctuation. It sickens me so.

One of the main things I find that people seem to have trouble with is the humble comma: ,. the comma effects the flow of the sentence, giving a reader a chance to breath, and separates ideas out. The misplacement of a single comma can drastically change the meeing of a sentence, as shown above.

Two other punctuation marks I also see left out are the colon, :; and semicolen, ; . However, I fear the latter is above the heads of most (Even I'm not 100% certain on how to use it). The colon is used like this:

She packed away her few belonings: two worn patched dresess, a pair of shoes, and an old rag doll.

NOT like this:
She packed away her few belonings: two worn patched dresess, a pair of shoes, and an old rag doll, then ran away. (this is because "then ran away" is not part of the list of her belonings)

The elipses, ...., is used when you want to trail off.....
Note that it is not for separating out information:

I like apple pie..... And cherry pie.... And I like to eat it cold......

And I'm not even going to start on the apostrophe, '. *shudders*

Edit: Thanks to Dasair, I now have the use for the semi colen:


If you have anything you would like to add, or correct me if I'm wrong, feel free to say so.

Damn.
She's just really bad with spelling, and she's told me that before a lot, so she lets me edit her posts, and I thought I had everything right. Therefore, when you said that, I checked each time I saw "punctuation" to see if I had missed one, and then I looked at the title...
Anyways, it's edited now.

Not everyone is perfect.

'do you think gays are hated by god because got said in the bible that god hated gays what do you think' is different than 'I think abortion is murder because the futis is a living brething human being. I think it is imoral'. If you can read it, then it's okay. But her example on global warming? -shiver-

Haha, yeah... It's not just punctuation either. At one point, it had gotten so bad I considered putting this in my signature:



But I decided against it.

I had one on capitalization that had that...

My teacher would have a heartache if she saw some of these boards. I despise the people who have this huge piece of text with little to no punctuation, and they expect this to be readable.

Yes...and then again only some instances. Some corners can be cut, and others can't. For example, "I'm going to the store," "Im going to the store," and, "im going to the store are all acceptable in my opinion, capitalization isn't all too important...it's more so the chat speak and such like "u" and "r" and other one letter words where sometimes it's an entirely different language.

I only care about the sudden disaperence of punctuation marks. I am not a gramer natzi. If I can still read the text, it is fine.