Proper Punctuation
I’ve been reading “The Elements Of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. It is a fascinating book that attempts to teach people how to be better writers. This may be a cause lost on me but I find it worth the effort regardless. I discovered this morning that all of the titles to my journal entries have been improperly punctuated. Complete dates, like the one used in the title of this post, contain parenthetical clauses (as does this sentence). The separate parts of the date should be delineated with commas, like so:
Saturday, September 9, 2023 not Saturday September 9 2023, as I have been doing my entire life.
I find it utterly useless to acquire this knowledge this late in life, but also utterly charming.
You have probably noted that I created a sentence above that contains two parenthetical clauses, one separated by commas and the other delineated using parenthesis. I have no clue what William Strunk would have to say about that, but I suspect he would find it appalling.