Purposeful Punctuation

The chapter on purposeful punctuation was an excellent review. It went over everything that I have been taught since elementary school and more! When I have a punctuation question, I now know where to turn to for a quick, straight-forward answer. This chapter will definitely serve as a great resource. For a more in-depth review, additional reading is required; however, this chapter makes further study easy by providing associated page numbers. Being the huge dork that I am, the reading sparked my interest in semicolons. I wondered about semicolons in a series when a segment in the series possesses a comma. I didn?t know whether or not a semicolon was needed between all segments or just around the segment with a comma. Page 361 addresses this issue somewhat, but the example was not informative enough to answer my question, and additional page numbers for further enlightenment were not offered. Even though I intuitively knew the answer, I tried to look it up online. I found nothing. Sometimes, no matter helpful the reading, you just have to ask the professor. As it turns out, if one or more of segments in the series have a comma, a semicolon is required between every segment in the series.

Writing strategies I plan to use:

1) Sentence Rhythm

2) Cohesion (use known-new contract for better transitions)

3) Do not overuse the 'be' verb (substitute 'be' verbs with more precise verbs)

4) Deliberate Sentence Fragments

5) Use Gender Appropriately (use 'they' or the actual person(s) in place of 'he')

6) Word Order Variation (I don't know when I would use this though)