Study Finds Gateway Punctuation Abuse On The Rise

Washington, DC – In a special session held during the recent three-day National Teachers of English Convention, the findings of a recent study were introduced, indicating all too clearly that the abuse of highly addictive punctuation, particularly the semicolon, was drastically increasing among teenage youth.

“For as long as there has been correct usage of English, there has also been abusage,” said head researcher and grammarian Penny Talfigton. “English teachers across the country have for years tried to keep budding writers from experimenting with sentence structures that, while technically correct, are ridiculously long, pretentious, and unclear. However, there has been a recent trend of teachers encouraging students to ‘develop as writers,’ which is essentially an endorsement of open, uncontrolled experimentation.”

Findings of the report indicated that overuse of the semicolon has risen over 60 percent in the past ten years; tests of a sample group of student writers revealed an 80% tolerance for repeated use of semicolons when none were necessary. Even commas, a normally safe punctuation, have been subject to abusive splicing by over 90% of high-school-aged teens. Case studies show months of grammatical therapy as well as complete isolation from 19th-century British writers is necessary to completely rid addicts’ writing of convolution.

“Parents, there is only so much your child’s English teacher can do; the burden is on you,” said Talfigton. “Listen to your child and read the schoolwork they bring home. Are they using two or more independent clauses in a row with proper use of a conjunction? Do they often use the words ‘however,’ ‘consequently,’ ‘moreover,’ ‘and therefore?’ Do they insert pauses with commas to set off appositives and non-essential phrases? If you answered yes to any of these questions, your child could already be a punctuation whore.”

The study also demonstrated that over 75% of semicolon addicts went on to abuse harder and more dangerous punctuation, mainly the dash and the colon. The dash -- used to indicate a sudden break in continuity or to set off an explanatory, a defining, or an emphatic phrase – often is abused by indicating worthless text. Addicts who manage not to overdose on the colon through its variety of uses often write and read in a semi-hallucinated state, spending years as incurable publishing academics.

“Fear the day when the colon becomes overused: it will mark not only words, phrases, and clauses that explain, enlarge upon, or summarize what has gone before, but also the downfall of literary society as we know it,” warned Talfigton. “They say that variety is the spice of life, but I’ve seen grammatical variety powerful enough to kill a horse.”







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