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by Miriam
My friend Jim Donahue of
The Velvet Blog, a great copyeditor and literary curmudgeon (in the best sense of the word) pointed me toward
this piece in Salon. I admit that I, too, find it irritating when writers decide to do away with punctuation and other grammatical and syntactical rules and claim artistic license as their excuse. Seems to me it’s mostly laziness. But then, I may be a little OCD about the whole thing. How do you all feel about quotation marks gone AWOL?
Forgoing quotation marks has been done so often, it's almost gimmicky now. There's nothing really new and fresh about it, so it seems the "artistic" value is negligible.
Hate it, hate it, hate it.
But I'm a little OCD about things like that, too.
Seriously, I have found it's difficult for me when reading to transition from action/description to conversation and back if I don't have them there.
Unless you're Cormac McCarthy I would suggest a writer stick with the rules.
Give me punctuation. Otherwise, I put the book back on the shelf and buy another one.