Welcome to…
~ weekly whimsy on all things punctuation ~
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👉🏼Do women really use more exclamation marks than men? (Spoiler alert - they do!)
👉🏼Can a full stop actually cost you your marriage?
👉🏼What does your punctuation give away about your sex life?
👉🏼How does a semi-colon make you a millionaire? (maybe!)
👉🏼And why is the comma responsible for the Russian revolution?
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If you’ve ever asked yourself such questions, there’s no need to convince you. You’ll have hit the subscribe button to your fortnightly dose of puncuation geekiness by now!
If you’ve *never* asked yourself such questions, here’s why you should.
Why punctuation?
Take a moment to open your phone. Have a look at your text messages. How many times have you used “proper” punctuation? Did you capitalise your “I” regularly? Did you end every sentence with a full stop? Chances are, you didn’t. It seems we don’t really need punctuation at all in order to make sense of writing. So, why did we invent it at all? And why am I encouraging you to hold punctuation close to your chest, using it as wildly and prolifically as possible?
WELLIMAGINEALLTEXTCAMELIKETHISYOUDBEABLETODECIPHERITBUTITDTAKEALONGTIMEANDBEREALLYCUMBERSOME. And yet, this is precisely how people wrote in the past. Punctuation, like any other human thing, is an invention by enlightened individuals working hard across thousands of years to make our life easier. And those dots and dashes - and very much those gaps between words, hence the name! - speed up reading and reduce miscommunication.
So, this newsletter is an invitation to take a pause for thought. To look around, deliberately. To attend. To attend to the small stuff, the minuscule apostrophe ear-ring, dangling from the top of the line, or the little curled comma-hook at the bottom that seems so negligeable, but leave it out, and suffer the consequences!
Through examples from literature, or politics, cartoons, or neuroscience, we’ll be unpicking how punctuation works, why we came up with it in the first place, and why we should hang onto it today. Particularly today. 🌍🕸
Putting the little inky smudges between our words centre-stage allows us to ask big questions about who we are, and how we relate to one another. But Mind the Gap isn’t all doom and gloom and seriousness: punctuation is FUN (really!), and will make you go “wow!”. Okay, well, maybe not always, but at least, “I never saw it that way”!
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What is it & how often?
Fun and brief snippets on punctuation: sometimes current, sometimes timeless. From “Why is it important to know how many !!! Trump is using?” to “How come Shakespeare was a poor punctuator?” (A comforting thought to the dot-and-dash-challenged among us.)
Mind the Gap comes once a fortnight, right in the middle of it at 2pm UK time. 🕑
Ready for some Wednesday Whimsy once in a while?
Who I am & what I do.
Apart from being the world’s biggest brackets-fan (probably an uncontested title I can hold forever), I’m a literature scholar-turned-writer, producing books, articles, and podcasts on punctuation, language, and literature for a public audience. I love climbing down the ivory tower, so get in touch if you want to nerd out over asterisks!
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Join now - punctuation to the people!
Mind the Gap is free & will remain so. If you enjoy the newsletter, you can tell me that my work is valuable in three ways:
Drop me a line! 💬 I love hearing from punctuation-enthusiasts (and the few haters). You can also check out my website & blog with lots of longer essays on punctuation stuff.
Buy my books, for example the whimsical biography of the !, called An Admirable Point (preferably from a local bookshop!)
Donate to a charity. Karma is real. 🧿
