Punktuation

In the Event of My Demise

In the event of my Demise

when my heart can beat no more

I Hope I Die For A Principle

or A Belief that I had Lived 4

I will die Before My Time

Because I feel the shadow's Depth

so much I wanted 2 accomplish

before I reached my Death

I have come 2 grips with the possibility

and wiped the last tear from My eyes

I Loved All who were Positive

In the event of my Demise

-Tupac Shakur

PUNCTUATION

I don’t have a Degree or ‘A’ levels. In truth, I often learn “on the job” when it comes to punctuation. The other day, I was tinkering with a composition called, Poppy (it’s on my website). The poem has dialogue in it, so, I needed to know if a full stop (period, in American parlance) came before or after the speech marks/quotation marks when written in BrE*. I did what I always do...researched the issue on the web. - After several fruitless hours (which I will never get back) of reading conflicting views on the subject of inverted commas & full stops; confounded by the fact that the point of view varies, depending on whether you reading from an AmE or BrE website. I stumbled over these two academics having an uprock over a friggin full stop!

Look, I’m grateful to the editors & proof-readers, the people who compile the dictionaries and write the reference books (that I often use and refer to). However, I have nothing in common with the kind of person who writes-off or judges another writer purely because of a misplaced fucking comma (incidentally, the irony of ME castigating book-smart fools because of THEIR fetish for punctuation - is not lost on me). I happen to believe, it is often incumbent on the reader to try and understand the “writers voice” whenever and however the writer tries to communicate, surely the intent to “communicate’ is what counts. The poetry of Tupac Shakur (as above) and the autobiography, Push, by Sapphire, springs to mind and exemplifies my point.

I know it’s not very nice to mock the intellectually gifted, but hey-ho. For the immoral out there (like myself) who do love a good catfight between the highbrows, check out the following link. The spat seems to be between an American (called Mallam) and a Brit (called Quizmonster). Trust me, the bitch-fight really does appear to push the “special relationship” to the limit!

http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk…

*BrE = British English. AmE = American English.

Mission Statement

The following is my attempt to heed the penultimate line of Tupac’s composition, In the Event of My Demise…

On a positive note:

Not every proof-reader, lecturer, teacher, editor, etymologist etc. is an academic. I use the word ‘academic’ as a pejorative, referring to someone who uses his or her intellectual prowess as a weapon. - In much the same way, as I find it distasteful for a beautiful woman to use her sexuality as a weapon. If you’re not guilty of using your knowledge as a truncheon, then cool, I’m not referring to you - in fact, I’m grateful to people like you for teachin’ me ‘ow ta b a betta riter…


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