Proudly serving in the war on periods

Sentence so long she chuffed

The process of becoming a lifelong writer began, for me, in the first grade, at least I think, and I am relatively certain that from there it never really stopped; mostly I know this to be true because I am writing this here, for you, today, and I know that that must count for something; but, this journey took its twists and turns, for eventually, the process of bringing together a couple of words to tell about my weekend became a process of encoding meaning and following rules to produce a sort of world within words, and it was the ornateness of the process that I found to be so appealing; nevertheless, I have a qualm with the rigidness, restrictiveness and righteousness of rules (note the lack of oxford comma here — something I battle fiercely, furiously and ferociously, considering I often worship it indignantly, because truth be told it just makes sense — there should, in fact, be a pause between the second-to-last thing in a list and the last thing and that pause should be emphasized with a simple mark, to which we, in the writer community refer to as a “comma,” but for journalistic integrity I am simply unable, so says the Associated Press (AP) Gods) and their tendency to ask you to change the way you say things to fit some kind of set, acceptable, noramalized standard (no oxford comma, because thats not the kind of list I am making); at the same time, language is so cute with it's yours and you’re (an aside: because I can be a little… awful from time-to-time, if someone really pisses me off over text and simultaneously uses the wrong your/you’re I will correct them and say nothing else, and if you’re so inclined… ask me about the last time I did this, you’ll be sure to chortle, chuckle or chuff at least a little), in other words the rules of words and turns of phrase are simply adorable and shape thought in such a cool way, which is precisely why — and this is me finally getting to my point (but it only took me half a sentence to get there, so bear with me) — I do not understand the need for all the other formats (your APs, MLAs, Chiagos and so on) why must they not only be restrictive, but restrict in different ways, “they all serve different purposes that work for certain genres to tell different versions of a certain story,” you might say, and in response I would say, “ha, phooey,” because these citation styles operate to say things like “history papers should have footnotes,” but I think history papers should have poems made up from sketches of people’s notebooks from times of trouble and that they should be written in real people’s chicken scratch, as opposed to Arial 11 (Arial 11, are you freaking kidding me, obviously Times New Roman is the best; although, I think that because I traditionally write in MLA… so maybe I am just as oppressed and just as much of a poser as the next radical who is writing and raving in properly formatted language) the way we are asked to be, and I think that serves to demonstrate it is time for one thing: a war on oppressive literary constraints, a war on the not so humble.

Written by: Violet Zanzot— vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu

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