Okay, everyone, time to talk about excessive punctuation!!!!!!!! Yeah, I’m talking about you, Facebook status posters whose emoticons have the fluctuating emotional range of a jr. high drama queen. (I’m pretty sure some people have invented emoticons for things like “angst-ridden,” “perplexedly bemused,” or “slightly beaten down by the apparent meaninglessness of life.”) I’m talking to you, fiction writer whose narrator uses punctuation marks that really should only crop up in dialogue. And I’m talking to you, college student who thinks that a colon in the title of a paper will get an automatic A.
Usually there’s some traumatic event that subconsciously attaches writers to a particular mark, and then they use it. All the time. In almost every sentence. Until you never want to see it again.
Okay, that might be an exaggeration. For the most part, though, if you use a punctuation mark more than once a double-spaced page, it might be your punctuation habit. Try editing out some of those repeats, especially if someone else has mentioned that it’s distracting. It will be hard, I know. You have deep emotional connections to that mark. But just do it. It’ll make you stronger. I promise.
