Lets Eat Grandma

One of my means of introducing a lecture on punctuation usually started like this:

Me: I am going to write a sentence on the board and I want you to punctuate it.

(wrote the following on the board):

woman without her man is nothing

Students invariably chose two ways to punctuate this sentence, which follow:

1) Woman, without her man, is nothing.

Woman: without her, man is nothing.

Clearly these have two entirely different meanings, and the lesson would get a giggle from the students, who usually stayed interested for another 37 seconds until they realized that was the high point of the class and the rest was boring punctuation reminders.

Some time ago I “liked” a page on Facebook that I like even more than my sentence: “Let’s eat Grandma!” or, “Let’s eat, Grandma!” punctuation saves lives.  Never mind that the punctuation itself on most of these Facebook pages is atrocious, and this site itself seems to have become a landing page for spammers; the cleverness of this one caught my eye.

The moral of the story?  Don’t scoff at commas and semi colons.  They really do matter.

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