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Re: School and Punctuation
Posted By: Sam, on host 24.61.194.240
Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2002, at 08:46:05
In Reply To: Re: School and Punctuation posted by Andrea on Wednesday, March 27, 2002, at 07:56:08:

> I agree with your teacher about arguing on punctuation and the importance of a correct one.
> Who studies Latin language knows how a comma may totally change the meaning of a sentence:

I stumbled upon an interesting way in which a comma changes an English sentence around quite by accident. It was when the countdown for Murkon's Refuge was going, and I added a word or two to a sentence gradually. The sequence went like this:

Prepare yourself.

Prepare yourself for an epic adventure.

Prepare yourself, for an epic adventure comes.

All three are complete sentences and punctuated properly, but if a sentence like this was longer, the comma, or lack thereof, could cause you to read the sentence quite differently until you got to the end, where it matters how you read the beginning. A comma error in such an instance would cause the reader to stumble and have to back up and reread and figure out the proper parsing of the sentence before te meaning became entirely clear.

Ok, so it's not as dramatic as your Latin example, or even as interesting, but *I* thought it was pretty cool.

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