Send me your punctuation and grammar questions

Have a question about punctuation or grammar? Please comment below and I’ll post the answer in this forum.

An editor’s lament

Even before I started on the path to journalism, I lamented how e-mail seemed to be causing the degradation of proper punctuation and grammar. Use to be, when we handwrote or typed a letter to mail, it was more natural to a) take our time to actually craft coherent thoughts and b) review everything before sending.

With electronic mail, most of that went away. What happened to complete sentences? What happened to capitalization and punctuation? WHAT HAPPENED TO PEOPLE MAKING SENSE?!

Maybe it’s because we’re in too much of a hurry. Or because we’re too lazy to hit the shift key to capitalize the first words in our sentences.

The trend is getting even worse as we fast-forward to the whizzing world of texts and social media. But I say correspondence doesn’t have to go into the tank just because we’re more connected. Even in 140 characters, you can follow the rules of grammar, make sense and have fun. In fact, I enjoy the challenge of the well-written tweet. I wish more people felt the same way.

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