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{{
[[File:acheposrophe.gif|link=Achewood|frame|The Greengrocer's Apostrophe strike's again!]]
{{quote|'''Rimmer:''' After intensive investigation, comma, of the markings on the alien pod, comma, it has become clear, comma, to me, comma, that we are dealing, comma, with a species of awesome intellect, colon.
▲{{quote|'''Rimmer:''' After intensive investigation, comma, of the markings on the alien pod, comma, it has become clear, comma, to me, comma, that we are dealing, comma, with a species of awesome intellect, colon.<br />
'''Holly:''' Good. Perhaps they might be able to give you a hand with your punctuation.|''[[Red Dwarf]]'', "Waiting for God"}}
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[[Self-Demonstrating Article|Self-demonstrating examples]] are all right, but please, for the sake of readability, try not to go overboard.
== Over-Punctuation ==
* As shown in the ''[[Red Dwarf]]'' quote, found at the top of the page, the overpresence, or abundance, one might say, of commas is a phenomenon which, to some, can, seemingly, cause frustration.
** Sentences, like the one above, where every comma has a defensible, albeit overly fussy, reason for being there, are less aggravating, than sentences, where commas, are just thrown, in, wherever the speaker might pause, to take a breath.
* Some writers like to use ellipses in place of commas which... besides being infuriating to those who understand the proper use of the ellipses... makes it look like the writer is either leaving out a lot or just struggling to think of a way to end the sentence (or is [[William Shatner]]). In addition.... the number of periods used in said ellipses tends to vary wildly..... anywhere from the standard three<ref>Or four at the end of a sentence, [[Grammar Nazi|to be overly technical]]</ref>................................................................. [[Toy Story (franchise)||to infinity and beyond]].
** Some might argue that ellipses are inappropriate [[Incredibly Lame Pun|period]] in technical writing (unless indicating a truncated quotation), but ellipses of varying length are beneficial to informal communication for conveying various nonverbal
*** And others would argue that that shows a lack of understanding about punctuation, as any of those can be conveyed in other ways. (For chirping crickets, stick some non-dialogue description in between.)
**** Yet others would remind those others that the point the original arguers were making related not to dialogues in a written work, but actual written communication, where sticking a non-dialogue description could possibly hurt the flow of the dialogue more than a row of periods. *The poster looks especially self-satisfied at the obviously mocking use of weasel words he accomplished in his response.*
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**** [[Mass Effect 2|Ah yes, "Scare Quotes". We have dismissed those claims.]]
** Furthermore, [[Grammar Nazi|technically]], punctuation should only go inside the quotation marks when quoting the sentence, and not just for "a few words". Quotations for "emphasis" usually fall "under this". "Do you see what I'm saying?"
*** It gets
** Behold thy savior: [http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/ The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks]!
** Note this is actually correct in Japanese. However, that doesn't mean you can leave it when translating a manga, since then you'll make the dialogue sound funny.
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** IMPROPER USE OF INVERTED COMMAS, HOOVER! *bang* *bang*
* The Greengrocers' Apostrophe: the use of an apostrophe to basically warn people that there's an "s" on the end of the word. Apple's $0.99 per pound! Apparently [[wikipedia:Apostrophe#Superfluous apostrophes .28.22greengrocers.27 apostrophes.22.29|the other Wiki]] indicates that a major grocery chain sort of overcorrects for this.
** This is made worse when the plural form is inherently different from the singular, like when the grocer has a sale on "potatoe's." (We can only presume that they once belonged to Potatoe. Or [[Dan Quayle]].)
* The use of + to mean "and". This is only acceptable ''in handwriting'', where many people substitute a plus sign for the ampersand on the understandable grounds that "&" is hard to write.<ref>Understandable, but ultimately misguided; if you can write the numeral 8 or the infinity sign (∞) without any trouble, then you can write an ampersand. And the ampersand also has a notable advantage over the plus sign: you can write it in one fluid motion, and don't need to lift your pen from the paper while writing it.</ref> But seriously, if you're on a keyboard, you've got the "&" right there. Why would you use a "+"?▼
▲* The use of + to mean "and". This is only acceptable ''in handwriting'', where many people substitute a plus sign for the ampersand on the understandable grounds that "&" is hard to write. But seriously, if you're on a keyboard, you've got the "&" right there. Why would you use a "+"?
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** The perfect example of the importance of commas: compare "No, don't stop!" with "No, don't, stop!"
*** I'm pretty sure those should be "No! Don't stop!" and "No! Don't! Stop!" Or maybe "No; don't stop!" and "No; don't. Stop!"
**** Fine then, here's another capsule example: "Let's eat, Grandma!" versus "[[I'm a Humanitarian|Let's eat Grandma!]]"
** Note that, as with any rule, underuse of commas can still be done right. ''[[The Great Gatsby]]'' is notorious for its lack of them, and considering that Fitzgerald spent hours choosing individual words, it's unlikely that he left any commas out by accident.
*** Although he did make a few errors in his word choice (referring to the retina as a visible part of the eye, for example), so it's still possible.
** Sometimes the lack of commas is acceptable in a form of media, often to make the author sound like a [[Motor Mouth]].
** However adverbials at the start of sentences are often mistaken for conjunctions, leading to the omission of a necessary comma.
** Consider the Oxford comma, used (or not) at the end of a list of similar elements. Despite what [["Weird Al" Yankovic]] says in one of his songs, leaving it out is not always a good idea. Consider this fictional case of a Catholic making an acceptance speech upon winning an Oscar: "I'd like to thank my parents, God, and the Pope" vs. "I'd like to thank my parents, God and the Pope".
* Another one often found on the Internet is lack of question marks when appropriate. It can be useful for [[Flat What|asking questions flatly]], but otherwise, why on Earth do people do this.
* In extreme cases theres [[No Punctuation Period]]
* Poor little{{color|white|-}}known, seldom{{color|white|-}}used hyphen. Many people seems to have a deep{{color|white|-}}seated hatred of this too{{color|white|-}}discreet punctuation
** Perhaps it is an issue with it being difficult to find on a standard keyboard, and people just not being comfortable using a tiny, easy-to-lose, minus symbol instead of a proper hyphen. Compare - with --.
*** Isn't a hyphen (-) for double-barrelled words or names, tmesis-usage (abso-bloody-lutely), and combining-words-to-make-them-link-more-
*** Correct. And since a double-barrelled word has one hyphen, a triple-barrelled word naturally has two, and so on. Many writers seem to have an absolute phobia of multiple hyphens, and will write "six year-old children" instead of "six-year-old children", thus changing the meaning completely.
* People who don't close their parentheses (this is very annoying.
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*** Of course, computer programmers are used to using several parens nested inside one another, and sometimes find it annoying when the type of parens switch, because different parens mean different things! [[Self-Demonstrating Article|Like { methods returning (various things from array_entries[21]);} ]]
*** And God forbid it when someone both uses parentheses within parentheses ''and'' doesn't close them. (Honestly, this is the most annoying thing ever. (This is bad enough on places like [[YouTube]] (Less forgivable on conversation-based sites like forums.)
*** Most style guides forbid the use of nested parentheses except in the case of symbolic use (such as math equations or programming examples). If you really must break into a parenthetical note with another, internally separated idea (which is almost never strictly
* [[wikipedia:James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher|"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher"]] is a perfect example of what happens when punctuation goes awry.
** And don't forget what happens when [[wikipedia:Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo|Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.]] You get a lot of angry buffalo.
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* Though the overuse of exclamation marks is well known, it can be just as distracting ''not'' to see one where you might reasonably expect to, such as in dialogue when the tag is something like "yelled", "shrieked" or (especially) "exclaimed".
* One extremely common error is the absence of commas at the end of dialogue. For example; "This looks bad" he said. This is fairly minor, but it can be annoying when it occurs too often.
** Or "This looks bad." He said. It creates a stop in the sentence which makes the "he said" sound awkward and out of place.
== Miscapitalization ==
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** Some Internet fora will change any post in all-caps so that it capitalises every word. It's a nice compromise since it prevents you having to read all-caps, while still allowing you to deride those attempting to use them.
* Capitalizing The First Letter Of Every Word Does ''Not'' Make You Look Smart, People That Do It. Even If It Took All That Extra Effort.
** And capitalizing The First Letter Of Every Word of a phrase on
** [[Discworld|It Could Also Make You Sound Like A Golem.]]
** [[Homestuck|Or Kanaya.]]
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** Note that capitalizing Random Words actually has an effect on how you can Read them (pausing before the word and emphasizing the capitalized word), as well as the Sense you derive from them (you can actually cause the reader to perceive a different lexical entry, even a different pronunciation: lima, Lima). This makes certain Capital Letters very useful in [[Winnie the Pooh|certain Contexts]], but obviously suffers from overuse as much as the next writing Convention.
* complete lack of capitalization even when needed, on the other hand, is not much better. capitals are integral part of the rules for spelling. there is no excuse for ignoring them. whether you are called [[E. E. Cummings|e e cummings]], jack, peter, or alice, or that your birth language is english, french, german or spanish... it just shows writers who don't care (or don't even know what the shift key is for).
** ah (but?) eecummings, use-d p!unctu ation: at times
** cummings disregarded punctuation as a stylistic choice to say something about his writing or emphasize where he did use punctuation. he did know what proper punctuation was.
** intentional lack of capitalization can be used stylistically to make text feel less formal, more laid back or more down to earth, and especially to suggest the writer isn't stuffy or anal. note that punctuation may or may not be altered from formal usage.
** it can make the writer look anally informal though.
** and it can be difficult for dyslexics to decipher. do you mean john or john?
* [[Berserk Button|AnD nEvEr EvEr AlTeRnAtE-cApS mEsSaGeS unLEsS yoU'Re wRItiNg a RANsoM nOTe; iT's ["
** [[Manos: The Hands of Fate|WhAt If YoU'rE tOrGo]] oR [[Homestuck|GaMzEe]]? oR [[The Sandman|dElIrIuM]]?
*** [[
**** oR SImPly [[
* This is why correct capitalization is important. Compare:
** I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.
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** Better yet, don't use either one. Say "that is" and "for example" if that's what you mean!
*** You're no fun.
** And "ex." means "exercise", and thus shouldn't be used unless you're assigning homework.
* "[[Said Bookism
** Neil Gaiman ([http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2003/12/good-morning-he-exclaimed-perceptively.asp paraphrased]): "Said" is like the arrow of a word balloon, more a reading aid than an actual word. Use it consistently and it becomes invisible.
** Incidentally, the same also applies to "asked".
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** Dialogue tags other than said are effective ''only'' if they are used sparingly, in places where they clarify or (occasionally) emphasize the dialogue. Overuse doesn't simply annoy the reader: it diminishes the effect of the words themselves, to the point where they are virtually meaningless. If every character "exclaims" every line, the word will not have the desired effect, or any effect at all, when one actually does "cry out; say something violently or vehemently" (the dictionary definition of the word "exclaim").
** Tagging the speaker's names before his/her dialogue can solve this transparently: you identify the speaker quickly and it doesn't intrude into the flow of the narration. Movies scripts, video game captions, interactive novels, [[This Very Wiki]],... all of them have been narrating this way without calling your attention to it.
{{quote|
Bob: "Saw that coming."
Charlie: "Lovely, so that's why you called her his ex." }}
* Due to the fact that it can be seen a lot on this very wiki, it might be worth mentioning that "due to the fact that" is unwieldy and ''should not'' be used. You can usually do the same thing with "because (reason)" ("Because I've seen it a lot...") or "due to (reason)", and if not, you should probably rework the sentence anyway.
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** As a corollary, when you paragraph-break a monologue, you ''always'' omit the end-paragraph quotation marks for all but the last paragraph of the monologue; doing so lets the readers know the paragraphs are still being spoken by the person doing the monologue, and not by anyone else, or is a non-speaking paragraph.
** "As a second corollary, remember that dialogue tags are never capitalized." Said Bob. "Do you mean that I should keep them lower case even when I end a sentence with a question mark?" Asked Alice. "Yes." Said Bob. "You should also keep in mind that if the sentence would normally end with a period, the period should be replaced with a comma-- but only if the period comes ''before'' the dialogue tag,"
** "Fourth of all," continued Bob, "the speaker and his/her actions belong in the same paragraph."
** As mentioned above, it's possible to break rules if you really know what you're doing. The new-paragraph-for-new-speaker rule is one of the ones you see broken most frequently: one character says something, and the description of other characters' reaction include dialogue. Because a paragraph break would kill the flow, the rule is discarded and one kind of readability trumps another.
* And in a similar vein, there's the Block Paragraph Of Doom, where the writer fails to break up the story into paragraphs at all. Not bad in a drabble, but tedious to the point of tl;dr in a multi-chapter fic.
** Conversely, The Sun and the other tabloids often seem to think it's obligatory to start a new paragraph with each sentence. Wrong. Start a new paragraph when there is a new ''thought''; the first sentence states the theme of the paragraph, and subsequent sentences clarify it.
*** Many would dispute whether the typical tabloid article involves any thought - other than "I hate x" - at all.
* Very few people seem to get ''cannot'' vs. ''can not'' right, and write ''can not'' where it should be ''cannot''. Even raging [[Grammar Nazi
** Not necessarily the ''option''. This brings us to the oft-encountered mistake of people confusing ''may'' and ''can''. No, it's not just "polite" to use "May I?" instead of "Can I?"; "May I?" is actually the more logical choice because ''can'' refers to one's ability to do something, whereas ''may'' refers to permission.
*** If people are really bugged by this, try thinking of it as an abbreviation: "Can I do X?" is a short version of "Can I do X without you getting mad at me?"
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** Back to the original: a potential workaround is to exploit the beloved but underused hyphen. "John cannot run" and "John can not-run" clearly mean two different things, and the hyphen links the negation to the thing it negates. However, this is less intuitive and should only be used if the awkward construction is, you know, [[Buffy-Speak|all necessary-ish]].
* One increasingly common error on the Internet is typing a semicolon instead of a colon. For a while it seemed like a misconception about where semicolons belong (it was especially common in cases where a comma or dash would have worked as well), but now it's starting to crop up between titles and subtitles (for example "Breakin' 2; [[Oddly-Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo]]"), so it's hard to tell if this is a grammatical error or people's shift keys failing at inopportune times.
* A dash and a hyphen are not the same
* If you restructure your sentence so that you don't end it with a preposition... then make sure you don't double up. I don't know for what reason people do this for.
** Perhaps the most common example of this is correcting for the old who vs whom issue, and then duplicating the preposition. Somebody thinks they shouldn't say "Who are we here for?" and "corrects" it into "For whom are we here for?"
** Better yet, forget about the old bugaboo about not ending sentences with prepositions. It's a rule that was made up by people who were ignorant of the way English grammar actually works.
*** Winston Churchill was once told he couldn't end a sentence with a preposition. His response? "That is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put."
* Quotation marks vary between regional versions of English. In American English, punctuation always goes inside of the quotes, unless doing so would change the meaning of the quote, or if it's a colon or semicolon. It doesn't matter if you are using single or double quotes as appropriate for your style standards; these same rules apply.
** And in British English, punctuation goes inside the quotes if and only if it's part of what is being quoted. For instance, "John wrote the word 'cat', and then crossed it out." The comma isn't part of the word 'cat', so it goes outside.
** Exceptions where Americans deliberately employ the "British" usage do exist. It's most common when discussing
* "it's" versus "its". The former is the contraction of "it is" (or "it has"), the latter is the neuter possessive. A good rule of thumb is, if the words "it is" don't fit in the sentence, use "its". For example, "The dog scratched it's balls" would be wrong. It just looks completely nonsensical, unless it's supposed to be a run-on sentence and the dog's ''name'' is "Balls."
** Related, "who's" versus "whose". The former, of course, means "who is/has", the latter indicates possession. Consider: A car is being advertised for sale. You might ask, "Whose car is being sold?" or, "Who's the current owner of the car?"
* Speaking of contractions, some people don seem to realize just how important ''finishing'' certain contractions are. Some people can seem to finish contractions ending in "'t", which can become confusing when certain words come up. In some cases, the context can clarify the usage, but other times it can without causing confusion.
* Then there are those who overuse "then" to connect a sequence of events. Then someone reads the work and stumbles over the verbal tic. Then the author wonders how he can avoid overusing "and" or "but" instead. Then the reader explains that "then" usually goes ''after'' the subject of the clause, and is not a conjunction. Then the writer has to start all over.
** Speaking of "then", there's the then versus than issue. "Then" is used to sequence events as described above, "than" is used to denote the use of one option over another. For example, "I'd rather go to the movies ''than'' go to the park," means that the speaker prefers the option of going to the movies over the option of going to the park, while "I'd rather go to the movies ''then'' to the park," means that the speaker prefers to go to the movies and go to the park afterwards.
* It's possible to replace parentheses, if you really must, with other punctuation marks. Emdashes
== Example's from specific–media ==
===
* A mildly famous scene from ''[[Preacher (Comic Book)]]'': "Improper use of inverted commas, Hoover! [http://www.freewebs.com/dobermansatplay/Preacher3.jpg Improper use of inverted commas!!]{{Dead link}}"▼
== Comics ==▼
▲* A mildly famous scene from ''[[Preacher (Comic Book)]]'': "Improper use of inverted commas, Hoover! [http://www.freewebs.com/dobermansatplay/Preacher3.jpg Improper use of inverted commas!!]"
* In ''[[The Boys]]'' (also by Garth Ennis), Hughie reads a comic book out loud: "an' he's goin'... I hope this '''hurts''' --in bold-- every bit as '''much''' --in bold-- as what you '''did''' --in bold-- to that '''boy''' --[[Bold Inflation|in bold]]... [[Conversational Troping|Why do they do that anyway]]? It's really annoyin' trynna read it, it makes it like stop-start, stop-start, stop-start, you know?"
* [[Deadpool]] lampshaded his own overuse of the ellipsis by announcing he was "talking like...Shatner".
* Mocked in [http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-09-24/ this] ''[[Dilbert]]'' comic.▼
* As a general rule, [[Silver Age]] Marvel comics would end ''every single sentence'' with an exclamation point! Justified a bit, as [[Stan Lee]] actually talks like that! Excelsior!
** Same thing about movie / TV series parodies in [[Mad Magazine]].
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* As pointed out above in the capitalization section, Delirium of the ''[[Sandman]]'' comics frequently misuses capital letters. She also tends to go without commas and periods sometimes when she's rambling. [[Justified Trope|Justified]] somewhat in that she's the [[Anthropomorphic Personification]] of ''crazy''.
* The Mad Hatter from ''[[Batman]]'' as written by [[Jeph Loeb]] speaks in aLterNATinG cAPs.
* ''[[Krazy Kat]]''. Along with some minor [[Xtreme Kool Letterz]], many nouns would end up in quotation marks. This is not limited to Krazy's [[Funetik Aksent]].▼
* [[Speech Bubbles]] in general tend to be printed in ALL CAPS. ''[[The Ultimates]]'' specifically didn't do that.
=== Eastern Animation ===▼
* The old Soviet-era cartoon ''The Land of Skipped Homeworks'' (Страна не? ыученных уроко?) had one phrase that later became [[Memetic Mutation|the '''direct''' illustration of this trope]]. The protagonist, Victor Perestukkin, a labrake kid and his cat (talking cat during his travels) Kuzya had to pass various obstacles... straightly based on the homework he skipped, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|as the title implies.]] The mentioned illustration comes in the point where the Master Verb gives him a final task: finish writing his death order by putting only one comma in the correct sentence: ''Execute not pardon''.▼
=== Fan
* The [[Crowning Moment of Funny]] in the ''[[Harry Potter (novel)|Harry Potter]]'' fanfic ''[[My Immortal]]'': "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUKERS!" It was................................. Dumbledore!
* While it runs across the board in [http://captainbobbin.deviantart.com/ this] author's work, comma splicing is taken [[Beyond the Impossible|to the extremes]] in [https://web.archive.org/web/20130124143620/http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2011/027/2/6/xemsai___cb_romance_shorts_20_by_captainbobbin-d383ny3.html this piece].
* Marie Birch, infamous figure in ''[[Red Dwarf]]'' internet fandom from the '90s. Known for putting, unnecessary commas, in all her fan fictions, like this, not to mention, that her fan fictions, were awful, to begin with.
* Many MANY [[
** For clarification, bad use of the English language running the risk of deletion =/= the work in question actually being deleted.
* If you are writing a [[Yiff]] fic in which a lutrine character claims that a certain part of his anatomy is "larger than most otters'", please, [[Nightmare Fuel|PLEASE]] [http://rc88.dreamwidth.org/6248.html remember the apostrophe].
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* If you're writing a [[Pokémon]] fic, make sure to put the names of Pokémon in caps. Otherwise half of the Pokémon-fic-reading population will stop in their tracks when reading over a sentence like "The pikachu fell on the ground, spiral-eyed". [[Your Mileage May Vary|The other half, on the other hand, have it the opposite way.]]
* ''[[The Girl Who Lived]]'' has many a run-on sentence. This is not missed by the sporkers.
* ''[[Hogwarts Exposed]]'' is not kind to punctuation in general and semicolons in particular. Again, the sporkers have noticed. And like ''The Girl Who Lived'', it also has [https://web.archive.org/web/20120511150157/http://szaleniec1000.tumblr.com/tagged/sentences_are_not_minivans more than its fair share] of run-on sentences.
* [
===
* ''[[Who Framed Roger Rabbit?]]''. The title is a question, but there is no question mark. Supposedly it wasn't included because question marks are considered "bad luck" in the film industry. Do they really think all of the annoyed letters they're going to get when they don't include a question mark will be worth it?
** That would seem to imply that the title is an answer, not a question. That is, 'the man "who framed Roger Rabbit".'
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* Averted in ''Bridget Jones's Diary''. That apostrophe ''s'' means that the second word is pronounced "jone-ziz", but it is often misread as "Jones" (or incorrectly written as ''Jones' '') .
* [[Kiss Kiss Bang Bang]] features a grammar joke with a call back. First Harmony explains to Harry the difference between "feeling bad" and "feeling badly." Later on Harry tries to belittle "Gay" Perry using the same rule, but Perry's usage is correct, as he instantly points out:
{{quote|
== Jokes ==▼
* There's a famous joke about a misplaced comma in a nature brochure on panda bears. Instead of "Eats shoots and leaves" (meaning what pandas consume for food) it reads, "Eats, shoots and leaves," [[Don't Explain the Joke|meaning that it eats, then uses a gun and leaves]]. This inspired the title of Lynne Truss' [[Eats Shoots and Leaves|famous book]].
** Whoever composed that pamphlet really should have used a colon instead of a comma (and even that would have been unnecessary).
* One British comedy show from the mid-to-late 20th century had a sketch where an orator added a comma to "What is this thing called love?", resulting in the question "What is this thing called, love?"
* A relatively recent joke about the importance of the Oxford Comma (the one at the end of a list of items), where leaving it out changes the meaning of an award-acceptance speech from a Scientologist: "I'd like to thank my parents, God and L. Ron Hubbard."
=== Literature ===▼
* The ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]'' Saga series by Stephenie Meyer contains a copious amount of errors: [https://web.archive.org/web/20111006212200/http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/sentences_are_not_mini-vans Run-on sentences], [https://web.archive.org/web/20120511145902/http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/Punctuation_Abuse poor punctuation] and [http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/search/comma comma] [https://web.archive.org/web/20131115063230/http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/comma_abuse abuse], [https://web.archive.org/web/20120511145956/http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/capital_letters lack of capitalization], and [https://web.archive.org/web/20120511145802/http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/Sentence_Fragment fragments] but a few examples.▼
▲== Literature ==
▲* The ''[[Twilight (novel)|Twilight]]'' Saga series by Stephenie Meyer contains a copious amount of errors: [http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/sentences_are_not_mini-vans Run-on sentences], [http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/Punctuation_Abuse poor punctuation] and [http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/search/comma comma] [http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/comma_abuse abuse], [http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/capital_letters lack of capitalization], and [http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/tagged/Sentence_Fragment fragments] but a few examples.
* [[Harry Harrison]] does comma splices, these are annoying. Supposedly, they're deliberate. He writes the book, then later goes through removing extra words and pauses in actiony parts in order to make it sound fast. Periods take longer than commas. Ironically, the incorrect punctuation is just going to slow most people down. The correct way to punctuate those sentences would be with a semicolon.
* José Saramago is particularly guilty of this, with paragraphs that sometimes extend ''over 5 pages''. He also sometimes uses no punctuation marks other than commas and periods, and doesn't explicitly indicate which character is speaking.
** Saramago's "style" of punctuation is quite frequently mocked in his home country of Portugal. A high school Portuguese textbook featured a section on punctuation and an exercise featuring an excerpt of Saramago with the goal being to analyze its use. The kicker was that the author included a note on the margin reading "Please note that Saramago only uses punctuation in this manner for stylistic purposes and only in sections featuring dialog. In fact, outside of said sections, Saramago is actually ''more'' rigorous with punctuation [[Take That|than most Portuguese authors.]]"
* ''[[Discworld]]'':
** In ''[[
** Also in ''[[
** Then there's Terry Pratchett's exten'sion (in ''[[Going Postal (Discworld)|Going Po'stal]]'') of the ca'se of the greengrocer's apo'strophe, where one character's dialogue alway's had an apos'trophe next to each S. It i's mos't amu'sing.
** And the origin of this trope's name: Captain Carrot, who like all good dwarfs writes home to the old mine on a regular basis
*** It isn't necessarily a mistake Carrot's part. Reading the oath literally means that the recruits don't have to swear allegiance to the monarch, which in this case everyone knows is Carrot. He says that he doesn't want people to obey him because he is "... good at being obeyed", but because it is the law.
** In ''[[
*** It's not meant to be. Carrot is literal-minded, and Vimes was showing off that he knew the oath so well he could do it with all the correct punctuation as well.
** Of Course, There Is Also The Text Gag Of Golems Talking Like So, Likely Meant To Imply That They Are Very Loud And Demand Attention.
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*** That's the visual effect for Each Word Thudding Into Place Like A Stone Block.
* James Joyce's ''[[Ulysses]]'' has a final chapter with only two full stops. Also, Joyce refused to capitalise religious words (jew, christian, jesuit) and he hated quotation marks, using a dash to indicate a line of dialogue.
** In the ''[[Thursday Next]]'' series, the lack of punctuation is explained. {{spoiler|They were ''stolen''.}}
* "Certain" ''[[Dragonlance]]'' writers seem to be deathly afraid of conjunctions and skip right to the comma.
* Lampooning this is how [[Eats Shoots and Leaves|Lynne Truss]] made her name.
* Justified in ''[[Flowers for Algernon]]'', in which the narrator's use of punctuation improves and then declines in tandem with his augmented intellect.
{{quote|
** In ''Flowers for Algernon'', Charlie's two entries after Alice teaches him punctuation are overflowing with it. The next one contains a breakthrough as he's finally using punctuation properly.
* There's a particularly disconcerting example of run-on sentences in the final book in ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'', being well over two hundred words about the metaphor "in the dark", ballerinas, digging and a locked cabinet.
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* In ''[[The Perks of Being a Wallflower]]'', Charlie, when learning how to punctuate scatters punctuation all over that day's letter. The next day he apologizes.
* John Norman, he of the [[Gor]] series of novels, is quite content to overutilize the comma; nay, even more, the semicolon; rather than using periods to separate his thoughts he will use the semicolon; it is annoying; you start to count the number of semicolons in a paragraph; often his page long paragraphs will be only one or two sentences long; [[Department of Redundancy Department|he will use semicolons]]; this is especially true of his descriptive paragraphs.
* From a literary criticism by [https://web.archive.org/web/20100507150854/http://www.fofweb.com/Lit/default.asp?ItemID=WE54 John Fletcher] of ''[[The Stranger]]'':
{{quote|
=== Live: Action TV ===▼
▲== Live Action TV ==
* William Shatner provides a verbal version of this trope in ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]''.
* ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' [[In-Universe]] example: Jack O'Neill interrupts ''his own torture'' to point out a bad guy's grammatical error: "You ended that sentence with a preposition! Bastard!"
** As pointed out in the earlier section, this is one of the zombie rules of grammar. It's dead, but it just refuses to lie down. Of course, it's [[I Shall Taunt You|hardly out of character]] for O'Neill to do exactly this sort of thing; he may even have known it was a "zombie" rule, but who cares as long as you get the other guy confused or angry?
* ''[[Doctor Who
* Done intentionally by [[Motley Crue]]. Because [[Heavy Metal Umlaut|umlauts/diaereses are the möst metäl type of pünctüätiön]].
** Parodied in the name of fictional band, ''Spın̈al Tap'', where the diaeresis appears over the ''n''; a construct appearing in only a handful of very obscure languages. Note also the dotless ''ı''.
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* The back covers of [[REM]]'s ''Fables of the Reconstruction'' and [[The Stone Roses]]' ''Turns Into Stone'' had no apostrophes. In the former case the songs ''were'' actually called "Feeling Gravitys Pull" and all that, but the latter's fans were confused by tracks like "Fool's Gold" or "Something's Burning" lacking apostrophes.
** See? Is it "Fool's Gold" or "Fools' Gold"? Either of which could have multiple, different meanings.
** And of course there's also [[REM]]'s ''Lifes Rich Pageant''.
* The latest interview from Steve Perry, formerly of [[Journey (band)|Journey]]. [http://fanasylum.com/steveperry/ Dear GODS, cruelty to the common ellipse, lack of any punctuation, and the hideous color scheme] make this one un-readable interview.
* [[Dolly Parton]] has a song called "Everything's Beautiful (In ''It's'' Own Way)".
** And the [[Manic Street Preachers]] have "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart". Sic.
* [[Taylor Swift]] has a habit of hiding Secret messages within the Pages of her liner notEs. every set of song lyrics lAcKs capitalizatioN save for a set of letters that spell out a phrase relating to the sOng somehoW.
* [["Weird Al" Yankovic]] lambastes more than a few of these in his song [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc "Word Crimes"]. The video is an invaluable teaching aid, illustrating the errors in question.
=== New! Media! ===▼
▲== New Media ==
* When simple apostrophes or quote marks are replaced by an unreadable character sequence, due to encoding problems. There are a million different versions of this, and it's particularly bad on wikis due to the large number of different pieces of software (everyone's browser).
** To wit, an earlier version of this very entry said <nowiki>"probably because of a ?½¶
** [[Jargon File|The Hacker Jargon File]], for another example, has a default encoding which causes punctuation signs and non-breaking spaces to become a � sign (for those of you who can't see it, that's the Unicode "REPLACEMENT CHARACTER" and looks like a question mark inside a black diamond).
* One of the crackpots who is responsible for dozens of hoaxes when it comes to ''[[Lost]]'' spoilers is named ThEmIsFiTiShErE. What's worse is that, in his posts, he puts certain, random, often ''unimportant'' words in all-caps, making the reader just want to stab him in the face after a while. He also can't spell for crap.
{{quote|
* Some older ''[[Cracked.com]]'' articles are missing the "s" after possessive apostrophes. This is due to a technical glitch rather than poor writing, but it still makes some of the site' articles hard to read.
* A regular problem with the features on [[Cake Wrecks]], which do not go un-mocked.
* John Watson's [[Character Blog|blog]] and ''[[Sherlock]]'s'' website receive comments by a capitalisation rebel:
{{quote|
* Once on the [[
=== Newspaper Comic's ===
▲* Mocked in [http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-09-24/ this] ''[[Dilbert]]'' comic.
▲* ''[[Krazy Kat]]''. Along with some minor [[Xtreme Kool Letterz]], many nouns would end up in quotation marks. This is not limited to Krazy's [[Funetik Aksent]].
=== Print 'Media' ===
* The Women's Weekly magazines at checkout lines are apparently compelled by law to end every internal headline, front-page teaser, caption, and generally any sentence or clause outside of an article with either a question mark or an exclamation point. Feeling fat? Lose 200 pounds with this Ancient Chinese secret! While you stuff your obese offspring with these hideously ugly confections of pure sugar! Made from ingredients found in your local discount rack! Depressed? Buy a new purse! Like the one worn by this famous actress! Emphasis of everything actually equals emphasis of nothing? That's not what Oprah says!
* The children's book publisher ''Troll'' does the same thing in the newsletter that says what new books it's publishing. This is typically coupled with a rather hammy style of blurb that's apparently intended to make the reader think all their books are pulse-pounders, but more often comes off as [[Narm]].
=== Theatre ===▼
* For a while at least, [[George Bernard Shaw]] abandoned the use of apostrophes in most
▲== Theatre ==
▲* For a while at least, [[George Bernard Shaw]] abandoned the use of apostrophes in most contractions -- even writing "he'll" without the apostrophe -- though he dropped that practice later:
{{quote|I have written aint, dont, havnt, shant, shouldnt, and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he'll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli.|Letter to ''The Author'', April 1902}}
** Which, of course, means that he didn't realize at the time that "won't" and "wont" are also two different words.
* The Dutch comedian [[Herman Finkers]] plays with this in his linguistic fairytale ''Het Spreukjesbos''
{{quote|
[[Beat]]
"Hansel," said Gretel, "shall I wear my pretty dress today?" }}
** Acutally, [[Herman Finkers]] is a master of wordplay. The full joke requires some explanation. In the Netherlands, Hansel and Gretel are called Hans en Grietje. After the bit described above Hans responds with: Don't be so weird, Grietje Titulaer. Now, this might not be weird, but around the time this show ran, there was a well known Dutch public figure going by the name Chriet Titulaer. Chriet is a ''male'' name. To top it off: Chriet and Griet are pronounched exactly the same. He even mentions that Hans and Grietje are the Titulaer brothers. And this is just the very start of the "Spreukjesbos" segment.
▲== Video Games ==
* ''[[Tomb Raider]]: Angel of Darkness''. While punctuation errors are the least of its problems, whoever was in charge of the game's font apparently considered certain punctuation marks such as apostrophes far too exotic, and therefore they were replaced with a square symbol.
** Sounds like the inappropriate use of a title font, many of which are lacking non-alphanumeric symbols except those someone bothered to create.
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* The subtitles of ''[[Limbo of the Lost]]'' are wrong. All of them.
* Shodan from ''[[System Shock]]'' speaks in alternating caps.
* The subtitles during the final cinematic of ''[[
* The [[ZX Spectrum]] game ''Merlock the Mede: The Ashes of Alucard'' is inclined to use comma splices, or omit punctuation altogether.
{{quote|
* ''[[Guitar Hero|Guitar Hero: Smash Hits]]'' would be guilty of using quotation marks for emphasis, if they had actually used quotation marks rather than the offending apostrophes.
▲== Web Comics ==
* ''[[Bob the Angry Flower]]'' rants against misuse of apostrophes in [http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif this comic].
* ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' sometimes has an animated period reading posts from gaming forums and chiding the writers for their lack of capitalization and other grammatical errors.
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* [[Rock Paper Cynic]] has one of the most awesome examples ever [http://www.rockpapercynic.com/index.php?date=2010-12-06 here.]
=== "Web" Original ===▼
▲== Web Original ==
* "Cruelty to the Uncommon Comma" is a charge in the ''[[Protectors of the Plot Continuum]]'', especially the Department of Technical Errors (which the Uncommon Comma leads).
* ''[[Zero Punctuation]]'' is called that because the creator speaks very fast and without pauses, in the manner of someone reading a document without any punctuation. Mercifully his articles are not written this way.
* [[Homestar Runner|"Oh, if you wanna be possessive, it's just I-T-S, but if it's supposed to be a contraction, then it's I-T-apostrophe-S. Scalawag."]]
* MrDrake's ''[[Darwin's Soldiers]]'' stories can sound like this. An example (one sentence!):
{{quote|
* This is responsible for many, many [http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/ Cake Wrecks], be it [http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2010/06/we-learned-good.html eye-searingly awful misspellings] or [http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2010/08/perfectly-punctual.html horrible punctuation].
=== Real ... Life ===▼
▲== Eastern Animation ==
▲* The old Soviet-era cartoon ''The Land of Skipped Homeworks'' (Страна не? ыученных уроко?) had one phrase that later became [[Memetic Mutation|the '''direct''' illustration of this trope]]. The protagonist, Victor Perestukkin, a labrake kid and his cat (talking cat during his travels) Kuzya had to pass various obstacles... straightly based on the homework he skipped, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|as the title implies.]] The mentioned illustration comes in the point where the Master Verb gives him a final task: finish writing his death order by putting only one comma in the correct sentence: ''Execute not pardon''.
▲== Real Life ==
* The minefield of grammatical rules, exceptions and linguistic gray areas is the main reason why most major publications adopt or create an official style guide for its writers.
* This is far, far, far too common in Dutch, where the apostrophe denotes a short grapheme corresponding to a long vowel in plurals, mostly in originally foreign words. (Example: "Auto" means "car". "Auto's" means "cars", because "Autos" would be pronounced wrong, and "Autoos" goes against all grammar rules.) The apostrophe stands for a sound that's included in speech, but left out in written language. It... tends to go wrong.
** The same thing has been done to substitute for graves, acutes, and macrons. Once again, this convention tends to go wrong. Especially when it's impossible to tell if a word is supposed to be possessive, contracted, or have an accent on a vowel....
** Over-punctuation can occur in Dutch as well: very few people are aware that the apostrophe between a word and an S, like in English, can be omitted entirely in Dutch. In fact, not even the Microsoft Word grammar control knows about it, which is probably one of the reasons it's so little known: the Dutch tend to rely on the Word grammar and spelling control completely because of how difficult the Dutch language is.
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** Germanophones writing in English also often have trouble not putting Capitalization on every noun, like they are used to in their birth language. Anglophones tend to overcapitalize when writing in French, too (but then, [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_des_majuscules_en_fran%C3%A7ais the full capitalization rules] are tricky even for French natives).
** Likewise, the punctuation rules for the three languages are different. A colon, question mark or semi-colon is preceded by a space "example : this", German and French use commas less frequently than English. Decimals are marked with a comma, which is used in English as a separator "1,234" is just less than one and a quarter in French and just less than a thousand and a quarter in English. Dialogue in French texts is marked with «», then a dash for any speech running on. German uses „“ or »« (yes, the inverse of the French) and is more prone to using free indirect speech than English. Trilinguals despair.
*** Quebecois Francophones follow English rules for commas and decimals within numbers - sometimes.
*** Conversely, South African Anglophones use the German/French/Dutch ones.
** On a related note, Spanish (or at least the Mexican dialect thereof) uses dashes to indicate the beginning and end of dialogue (-like this -for example).
*** International Spanish rules set the use of a long dash (—) for starting a dialogue, with additional long dashes to add an explanation:
*** —It would be like this —said this troper—, exactly like this.
* The Apple website, much like [[Breaking the Fourth Wall|the previous entry on this very page]], has a tendency to mistake the word too (an adverb) as something that constantly calls for a comma preceding it. While it is possible to precede a 'too' with a comma, it is the editorial phrase of which they form a part that calls for the comma, not the word too... ever.
** eg. "Tias, too drunk to walk, decided to fly home." Here the too forms part of a tangent in the sentence, and hence the comma is appropriate.
** eg. "Tias, contrary to popular belief, can fly, too." Here the too is an integral part of the grammar of the sentence: it tells the reader something about how the ability to fly, and hence it should not be separated from the verb by its own comma.
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** The WeatherBug Site Tries To Add Some Sanity By Changing The Entire Message To Title-Case... But Keeps The Ellipses... And Humorously... Always Renders The Word "IN" IN All Caps... Assuming It To Be Short For "Indiana".
* When the German subjects of Gertrude, wife of Kind Andrew of Hungary took control of the kingdom in the king's absence, a group of conspirators decided to take down the queen, and asked the clergy for support. The archbishop, not wanting to choose sides, answered with a letter but deliberately left out all the commas, leaving room for two possible but entirely contradicting interpretations:
{{quote|
You should not murder the queen. To be afraid will be a good thing. If everybody agrees to it, I do not: I object. }}
** Leaving the error unfixed to point it out: as mentioned earlier, sometimes people forget to close their parentheticals. Even worse, sometimes people replace their parentheses with commas and ''then'' forget to close them. [[Self-Demonstrating Article|That happened]]; there should be a comma after "Kind Andrew of Hungary" up there.
* Some people on the internet tend to remove comments to their work with horrible grammar thus making the web a better place.
* The dropping of a possessive apostrophe at some time between the 1940s and the 1970s has lead to Ignacio Nachos Anaya losing the credit for the snack that he invented, [http://www.cbc.ca/radio/undertheinfluence/three-products-you-didn-t-know-were-named-after-their-inventors-1.4577004 originally called "Nachos' special."] (Note that the referenced page puts the apostrophe in the wrong place.)
----
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{{reflist}}
[[Category:{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Artistic License Linguistics]]
[[Category:Language Tropes]]
[[Category:Bad Writing Index]]
[[Category:Fanfic Tropes]]
▲[[Category:Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma]]
[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]
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