Writing vent

[lookashiny]

Did schools stop teaching kids that dialogue needs to have punctuation at the end of it? Because I see entirely too much dialogue in fics that is completely unpunctuated. It's just "I am an example", no period, no question mark, sometimes no commas. Why???

Comments

[sulien]

Sing it! I am right there with you.

As for schools, I think far too many of them function more as daycare than institutions of learning, and that only minimally. :-/

[lookashiny]

I don't think schools are so much daycare as they largely teach to the many standardized tests kids take and those don't have grammar or something.

[muccamukk]

I don't know, but I realised the other day that I don't even notice it any more. Maybe on rereading fic, but first read through my eye just sort of put it in for me.

[lookashiny]

That's interesting! It's enough of a jolt for me that I can't unsee it.

[badfalcon]

Now, I left school a few years ago now but we didn't learn anything about punctuation, it's something I've learned through my very patient beta reader. I'm forever messaging her to ask how I punctuate something. And where to put a paragraph break in. They just cared that we could spell.

[lookashiny]

Wow, that surprises me. My elementary school was not the best at teaching us spelling (lots of phonics) but we learned the basic punctuation stuff.

[khronos_keeper]

Interesting. I wonder how much of this is a hold over from texting and chatting, where it's pretty common not to end finishing sentences with punctuation.

[lookashiny]

Possibly. But they know enough to finish sentences not in dialogue with punctuation, it's just the dialog that's not punctuated at all.

[lazaefair]

Mm, I remember encountering terrible punctuation in fanfiction (including that exact dialogue mistake) as a snobby 12-year-old, so I don't think this is a recent problem. I can't remember my schools teaching punctuation specifically, either (this would be most of the '90s and early 2000s). I know I picked up on most punctuation conventions unusually early just from being a voracious reader, and lucked out genetically on having a brain that remembers language-associated things easily, so I was always a bit mystified that everyone else didn't just absorb what they saw in professionally-edited books and publications.

[lookashiny]

Terrible punctuation has been around forever, but I've only recently noticed the widespread no-punctuation-at-the-end-of-dialog phenomenon.