Daily Prompt: By The Dots

We all have strange relationships with punctuation — do you overuse exclamation marks? Do you avoid semicolons like the plague? What type of punctuation could you never live without? Tell us all about your punctuation quirks!

Many moons ago when I was in high school a buddy of mine mentioned one day how I used entirely way too many commas. I wrote him a note and slyly passed it to him so the teacher wouldn’t notice. In, the, note, I, put, a, comma, after, every, word, like, this. You know, just to piss him off. He didn’t get it. “See?! You use way too many!” I just shook my head. He wasn’t one for sarcasm.

Even though I thought I knew what I was doing, what he said still scared me. I remembered it for, well, the rest of my life up to this point. Any time I’m going over something I wrote I typically end up deleting or otherwise removing a lot of the commas I had placed in whatever I wrote. Sometimes they actually aren’t needed.

However, I recently wrote a short story for an anthology (it wasn’t picked) and I had my editor, the extremely awesome Jordan Drew, tell me what she thought about commas. It turns out she’s a fan and she told me to use them whenever I thought I should (basically) and how I wasn’t entirely wrong in the first place. So now I’m a fan of them again.

I also have a horrible time with apostrophes. I’m never sure when to use them or when not to. Semicolons, forget them. I almost completely understand when to use them, too, but I never get them right when I do use them, so I just don’t.

That’s about it. I think. Unless I’m massively screwing up other stuff and everybody has been too nice to tell me.