Once upon a time there was a young college student who indulged herself in all the grand luxuries: 6+ hours of sleep, an extra 15 minutes to shovel food down her mouth, and perhaps, if she was lucky, an hour a month to socialize. It was a grand life. There were no frogs or princes, but the young college student didn't complain; she wasn't much into making out with frogs anyway.
Then. One grey, cold afternoon, the wicked witch of West Campus assigned this young college student the dreaded style sheet. As soon as this wicked witch passed out the assignment sheet, trees shuddered in the background. A part of every English major's soul died that day. In fact, the style sheet was so ferocious, so evil, the young college student froze up and died simply after setting eyes on it.
* * * * * * *
Okay, so maybe I'm still alive and kicking, but my sanity sure isn't. For those of you who don't know (which is anyone who wants to still have a life), a style sheet is basically a longggg list of grammar and style rules for a certain article. Basically, you have to choose an article from a major magazine, mark every instance of punctuation/stylistic differences, find a rule in the Chicago Manual of Style that defends this punctuation, then record the rule/a million examples in a 20+ page project of doom. This one assignment in one class has basically turned into a full time job. And here's the kicker: I'm trying so hard to care, but I really don't. I'm so passionate about my indifference to comma rules, that it's kind of ruling out the point of indifference.
Since when did commas have to dress themselves up like they're going to tea with the Queen? What happened to all the happy, free-spirited commas who were all "hey man, I think we've gotta slow down and take a breath, care to alert the reader?" No, now commas have to take a stand and say "we're used for introductory adverbial phrase, but sucks to be you, you have to look up what an introductory adverbial phrase is, and oh by the way, we only do this on Tuesdays."
No one wants a tedious comma. Let the commas roam free, people!
Then we get to capitalization rules, and oh boy is that a trip. Not only do you have to find every instance of capitalization (ever notice how random capitalization just appears in the middle of a run-in quote just because it feels like it?), but you have to find the instances where something could be capitalized, but isn't. Like here's the word "heaven," all innocently lowercase, not causing any hooplah, and suddenly it gets a capitalization rule because maybe someone somewhere thinks it should be capitalized, but the Chicago Manual is all "haha, you may think you know capitalization, but 'heaven' remains lowercased because I said so!"
You know it's tyranny when lowercase words start popping up in capitalization rules.
I've had it up to here with style sheets. You can't see "here," but it's somewhere where capitalized cuss words are free to use all the commas and italics they want. They can even throw in some double explanation points if they want!! It's a free country!!!!
What's the rule for four exclamation points, I ask you? You don't think you're so smart now, do you Mr. Chicago Manual?
It's gotten to the point where every time I read something, I forget that I'm reading for content, and start frantically looking for commas and semicolons and dashes (oh my). Highlighters start flying about willy-nilly and commas attack me with their ferocious claws. These commas are double trouble: ferocious and pretentious. If we're not careful, commas will start attacking us in our sleep.
Except, oh wait, I don't have time to sleep, because I'M TOO BUSY WORKING ON THIS STYLE SHEET!
Even the name itself is deceiving. You think "oh it's one sheet, how bad can it be?" Well, when the sheets start multiplying and having little baby comma rules, it can get pretty damn horrible.
If you see dancing in the streets, you'll know I've finally handed in my style sheet and stopped caring about punctuation altogether.
How comforting it is to know I've found the right major.
Namaste.
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