This summer, I am embarking on a self-taught creative writing course (see my post: Autodidact’s Summer Creative Writing Course). I want to become a better writer. I need help becoming a better writer. While I can’t leave my kids to fly off to a formal program, nothing is stopping me from reading instructive materials and putting the advice I gather into practice.
This week, I started with the basics: grammar – more specifically, punctuation. I had a slow start with my self-assigned readings. The subject matter evoked shameful memories of my undergraduate composition class where my essay, composed during the first class meeting, was chosen by my classmates as the best-written. So why does this memory make me wince rather than glow with self-esteem? Because my professor systematically reamed the essay to show us all that we didn’t know shit about writing. Since then, I have never rushed to pat myself on the back – I try to avoid the embarrassment of premature congratulation.
Once I got into Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, I realized the subject wasn’t so bad. I never bothered with Strunk and White during my university life (non-English major here – that obnoxious composition professor probably put me off the entire discipline), but The Elements of Style is great little book of writing basics. It’s short, but eye-opening. I now realize how moronic I must seem to my blog readers. I am red-faced that I don’t remember as many of the guidelines of good writing as I thought I did (what was I saying earlier about hasty self-congratulation?).
Once I absorbed Strunk and White, I moved on to Noah Lukeman’s A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. It’s a technical read, but Lukeman provides abundant examples to make his points. In the first section Lukeman covers the three primary marks: period, comma, and semi-colon. He also covers colons, dashes and parentheses, quotation marks, and paragraph and section breaks. The chapter format for each point is as follows: how to use it, the danger of overuse, how to underuse it, the danger of underuse, context, what your use of the [insert punctuation here] reveals about you, and exercises. My use of various forms of punctuation, more often than not, revealed my amateur writer status: no surprise there. I haven’t done the exercises yet, but they can all be applied to my work-in-progress, which I am sure will render further revelations and self-loathing. Nevertheless, Lukeman has shown me the stylistic force of these seemingly mundane symbols, and I am, at long last, more confident about how to use semi-colons and colons.
