- My three favorite things are eating my family and not using commas.
- Let’s eat grandpa!
- I want to thank my parents, Tiffany and God.
- I’m sorry I love you.
- I find inspiration in cooking my family and my dog.
- Twenty five-dollar bills.
Each of the preceding sentences are funny because they are missing punctuation. The last example changes significantly by changing the punctuation. Read the sentences again the way they were supposed to be.
- My three favorite things are eating, my family, and not using commas.
- Let’s eat, grandpa!
- I want to thank my parents, Tiffany, and God.
- I’m sorry; I love you.
- I find inspiration in cooking, my family, and my dog.
- Twenty-five dollar bills. (Before, I had $100; now, I only have $25. BIG difference! Moving the hyphen cost me $75!)
Punctuation is important. That’s why Jeff Rubin founded National Punctuation Day in 2004. This veteran print journalist reads his paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, every morning with a red Sharpie in hand.1 Frustrated by grammatical errors in his beloved paper, Rubin thought it necessary to bring attention to the importance of proper punctuation. Besides the paper, Rubin has been traumatized by outdoor marquees which are some of the worst grammatical offenders of all time. Often, they lack possessive apostrophes as well as commas. The misspelled words are atrocious along with the usage of the incorrect homophones (ie: there, their, they’re).
I am certain that those with eagle eyes and their own red pen find plenty of grammatical mistakes in my devotionals. Even though I type, proofread, and proofread again, I still know that I miss things. After reading the devotion a few times, it’s amazing how you can breeze right over the mistakes and never see them until AFTER the devotional is printed. Then, they stick out like a sore thumb!
And you certainly can’t depend on autocorrect to correct correctly!
Since letter writing has gone by the way, emails and text messages are the contemporary culprits of punctuation and grammatical faux pas. Have you ever stared at a text message, trying to figure out what the person was saying because the abbreviations and shortened, misspelled words left you confused? Rubin probably needs therapy after some of his
friends text him!
Now, even though the punctuation may be correct, it really helps if we read it correctly. Let me share a personal example.
1 Peter 2:2-3 says, “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: (3) If so be ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.” This is a passage I memorized in Word of Life when I was in 7th grade and I never thought it made any sense. The fault was not with the verse. It was entirely with me. I read the verse without the comma between babes and desire. Even in 7th grade, the grammatical structure without the comma left me feeling like the verse didn’t flow or make a lot of sense.
Desire, as I was reading it, is a stative verb which refers to a state of being. It describes a quality or emotion. Trying to put the rest of the verse together with this didn’t make sense.
One day, I was reading this verse as an adult and suddenly, I saw the comma. Now, the verb is active. It gives a command. “As new born babes, – (pause) – DESIRE (this command tells me to actively desire) the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby; If so be (if you are desiring as you should), ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious.”
Punctuation makes all the difference! This verse came alive to me all because of a comma I had not seen.
Some who are reading this are not as blessed and amazed by my discovery as I was. That’s okay. Let me have my moment! Just let this be a reminder to us to always read Scripture slowly, carefully, methodically. There’s no prize for reading your Bible the fastest. Take your time and if something you’ve read doesn’t make sense, try looking for any missed punctuation.
“Study (be diligent) to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Timothy 2:15)
1https://www.npr.org/2010/09/25/130103176/sticklers-make-a-point-on-national-punctuation-day
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