I love words.
I like to talk. Spoken words mean that, upon discovering for the umpteenth time that real English tea is not an item that American grocery buyers consider worthy of shelf space, I can complain with verbal venom to the befuddled Whole Foods manager.
I like to read. I read so much when I was I child that my parents were concerned for my mental health. My mother nicknamed me Bookworm; not a title that I told many other people of at the time because when I was a child, reading was not cool. When I was eight, I loved Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Ruby Ferguson’s Jill and the Perfect Pony; I read those books over and over again, thumbing the pages until they barely resembled reading material.
Nowadays, reading enables me to devour health articles published in scientific journals like Neurology and Nature. I can then take the knowledge as technically written by researchers and provide my own account for those who read my news article reports.
Written words mean that I can learn, anytime, any place! Reading allows me to scrutinize the narrative on the back of potential warm-beverage candidates as I search forlornly for my beloved, yet elusive, builders tea in “the land of the free.”
I love writing. The written word facilitates that crucial communication between Whole Foods and me at times that I cannot find tea. I can write to and beg that the powers that be consider adding English tea to their Colorado Store offering; just for me. Writing allows me to have a conversation without even opening my mouth and without having to be in the same room as the person with whom I am conversing. What excites me most of all about writing, however, is that it is a tool of creation. Through writing, I can paint a picture (because quite frankly, watercolors are so very messy!)
I am passionate about punctuation. Hyperbole that statement is not; this not an exaggeration. Punctuation transforms! Punctuation describes! Punctuation explains! Punctuation is not only the chocolate ganache on top of the proverbial vanilla sponge, it is the fondant-sculpted, harp-playing, cherry-flavoured angel that perches artistically on top of the butter-icing.
A world without punctuation would look like this:
hi reader
what did you do today i hope that you took the time to add some full stops and capital letters to your letters text messages and emails because quite frankly without them anything written is very hard to read in fact you probably had to read this three times over already in order to make head or tail of the pigs ear that this is i mean to say by the way that the pig owns the ear not that there are multiple pigs in the room however my lack of apostrophe will have made that ambiguous as i can no longer indicate possession without punctuation nor can i ask a question or make a bold exclamatory statement all in all it is rather boring is it not you also risk killing someone as sentences without full stops run on and on and there is nowhere that the reader can stop and take a breath
I understand that punctuation is not every person’s cup of tea. In fact, there are some who consider people such as I to be pedantic antediluvian stick-in-the-muds who have nothing better to do than ponder over other people’s semicolon use. Others understand the value of a well-placed comma but are far too busy to spend hours trying to work out if it should go here, there, or if a full stop will do the trick.
If you fall into the former camp and would rather not write or punctuate at all, you might consider hiring me as a writer. Others, who write but understand the value of having another person edit your work, may be interested in my editing services.
Writing Services:
- Ghostwriting
- Website Copy
- Journal Articles
- Personal Essays
- Press Releases
- Manuals
- Marketing Copy