My students are struggling with commas. I'm not sure if they are teaching grammar in school anymore; since my students admit they have no idea what diagramming sentences is, I suspect they are not. Grammar school no longer lives up to its name.

A student proudly showed me these jokes last week, so excited that he had found something relevant that I might think was entertaining. They're from McSweeney's and the list by Eric Auld is called "Seven Bar Jokes Involving Grammar and Punctuation."

While teaching a business writing seminar last week, I decided to start our punctuation section with a simple list:

It's almost the holidays and I've been too overwhelmed with final grades (and students begging for better grades) to think of something to write. But a few years ago while at a poetry reading that was taking place in an awkward industrial space that forced the reader to stand in a corner lit primarily by the familiar white and red "Fire Escape" sign, I thought of this mini lesson on grammar.

Not that one. I'm talking about the one in written language. The colon is a tricky punctuation mark. Somehow, someone got it into everyone's head that the colon is best used before a list. Well, it can be used before a list, but only under certain conditions.

Today, maybe it's the overcast sky or the numerous requests I've had recently for proofreading, but I find myself thinking about punctuation. We don't use punctuation when we talk--most of the time--and we still manage to understand each other, so in some ways punctuation may seem extraneous or cumbersome. However, when we use written communication, we don't have access to all the signals we have for spoken conversation.