"If you write properly, you shouldn't have to punctuate." - Cormac McCarthy
Okay, so setting aside my annoyance at his lack of apostrophes, McCarthy certainly seems to get away with minimal punctuation. No brackets, no parentheses, no slashes, no dashes. Certainly no symbols, asterisks, quotation marks or semicolons. And as Oprah, ever the astute interviewer, points out, only one small colon. However, this does not legitimize him as a proper writer. Far from it.
Writing, to put it simply, is using your tools well. The English language has so many tools, often neglected (ever heard of the interabang? Didn't think so...) for the sake of tone, or register, or simplicity, or some infuriating need to imitate James Joyce. Just as an extensive vocabulary can make writing more concise and forceful, knowledge of punctuation, and the wherewithal to use it, can express different ideas and more complex interactions.
McCarthy still deigns to use the question mark, and the comma, because people speak in questions and pauses, and think that way, too -- they are simply unavoidable. But truthfully, communication is more than that. Human interaction is complex and novels need to convey it accurately. People can use semicolons and parentheses without ever touching a pen, and simply trust that their subtle inflections will be understood. The characters in The Road are denied any opportunity to do this, which I see as a failure of McCarthy as a writer. Even when one is only trying to convey an idea in an essay or an article, varied punctuation is an asset, provided it's used correctly; punctuation can give essays depth and clarity. There's no need to denounce the semicolon! Punctuation, I say, is crucial to proper writing.
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