Sturgeon's Law

No, this is not sad, this is good work. The world would be a better place if more poets went through their manuscripts and asked, as a rule, "do I really need that additional article? Does a comma really make the line move faster than a period?" The devil is in the details, but so is the salvation.

On a side note, my word verification pattern is "codworl," which has some potential.
 

I think I went through my book MS five times simply looking at punctuation - and especially those damn hyphens. (See above.) I took out a lot, and there are still too many in there. I am trying to go hyphen free in my new work.
 

LOL.

Dude, you're the man.


Word-verification? subsxegi.
 

You're at least one step past me... I just went through and chucked 99.9% of the epigraphs. I love epigraphs... but don't need them. On to the hyphens!!
 

I agree, it's not sad. Attention to detail is the essence of art.

Okay, maybe not the *entire* essense of art, but anyway a part of it.

On the other hand, beware of the tendency, widely encouraged by the academic writing program industry, to cut and cut and cut. Sometimes it's all right to leave things in. I like poems with one or two loose ends or bumps or odd things that don't quite seem to fit.

Word verification is "kuanc".
 

The bane of my existence is the comma. I put them in; I take them out. I put them in; I take them out. I think that I overuse the comma.
 

I guess I'm guilty of using some colons...

(and way too many fricking ellipses when blogging...ha!)
 

Quite an impassioned response!
 

I don't have a hyphen problem but i do have an emdash disability -- i use the emdash when i could just use a period -- see the thing is that i like the emdash because it suggests taking a deeper breath than a period -- and because i smoke a pack a day -- i need all the extra air I can get!