Please tell your readers where to turn.
This weekend I took a car ride up a twisting mountain road. I’d not been on that road for a year, so the route wasn’t familiar.
But as we ascended the highway we had an advantage. Ahead of each curve, a yellow sign’s twisting black arrow let us know which way we’d need to turn and how slowly to drive. So we could proceed with confidence, enjoying the journey.
I wish I could say the same for the social media posts I’ve been seeing lately. Unpredictable as a mountain road, they lack the written equivalent of those road signs.
We traditionalists call them punctuation marks. The one called a “period” (or in England a “full stop”) lets readers know not to plunge ahead into the next thought. (Beginning the next sentence with a capital letter offers further assurance.)
If your sentence curves, mark that with a comma.
If readers won’t be sure you’re asking something, end the sentence with a question mark.
One’s plenty. Same for exclamations. And treat both as though they’re so expensive, you use them only when you mean it—and then just one at a time.
If the point of a social media post is to communicate something, take the time to use punctuation road signs. There’s no point in sending readers off a cliff.
