What Makes a Good Writer?

The nine basic marks of writing are essential in making a piece of writing interesting and understandable. The proper use of this marks embellish writing.

According to the Survival of the Fittest  by Nicholson Baker, we must “assume that commas have been around for at least as long as electrons.” Cool fact! Who came with this wonderful idea of inventing a mark that would indicate a pause between parts of a sentence?

Semi- colons are relatively modern. The first writer to come up with this was Pietro Bembo in his first edition De Aetne, this was two years after Colombus reached America. Having into consideration that since that time people already used marks of punctuation, impresses me. While America was full of indians that probably, had their own way of punctuating, in Europe people already knew how to write. They also knew how to express their feelings and connect to the reader in they way they wanted, with the pauses needed so their piece of writing sounded professional.

Various writers prefer to avoid semi-colons because they say this are old-fashioned and middle-class, but personally this is a perfect way to indicate interdependent statements. However, the excess of marks can make the writing unclear. “The American copy-editing has fallen into a state of demoralized confusion over hyphenated and unhyphenated compounds.” This is said because in the book of Parker the fist semi-colons arise, confusing society and making them use this marks without knowing how to. Baker,  was impressed after sending one of his manuscripts to a copy- editor and noticing that about two hundred of the hyphens were deleted. Here, he started learning more about the proper use of them.  

The concept of a colon was first used in medieval texts as an s. Every culture and period of time is known by their unique form of writing. As time passes the symbols change but the concept is still the same. As nations and cultures develop, their form of writing changes as well.

“Scholars are said to study litterae, “letters,” not words.” The first biblical pointillist, Cassiodorus, started to instill the idea of punctuation. He said that this concept made writing more attractive for the readers to read. Still, writers have to be moderate in the use of them.

Quotations are another big part of writing. These marks are the ones that “mark an intrusion into what is almost sacred, into closed world of subjective expression.” According to Q as in Quotation adding quotes to a text, measures the author’s enthusiasm on his will to open to the outside world.

Even though we have been taught since we were little the correct use of punctuation we continue to make mistakes. If these marks are used incorrectly, they have the power of changing what the writer wants to transmit. What we have been examining in class is essential for learning how to write, improving this skill can change our way of writing drastically. Learning how to use the other marks of punctuation can make our writing more professional., therefore we have to learn!