Tom Kinsella has been learning about punctuation most of his life. In fourth grade Mr. Michaels told him that he had no sense of punctuation — none at all — and the comment didn’t bother that much. During high school Tom began to think he might need to know proper punctuation, but his teachers showed little concern to teach him. In college he took courses with several punctuation sticklers, particulary Bob Gross. Professor Gross sat him down one day and said, “Look, it’s easy; I’ll explain it.” He then described the proper use of semicolons in 17 seconds. Tom never forgot that particular lesson or the good professor’s insistence that he follow accepted conventions for punctuation.
In graduate school Tom began to fixate on punctuation. One way to describe his dissertation is to explain that it compared various styles of punctuation used to represent speech on the page. Tom saw that styles changed and evolved, and he learned that widely accepted conventions for punctuation are of fairly recent vintage. For the last twenty years or so he has continued to think and teach about the nature of modern punctuation. He tries to understand and explain that punctuation is bound by a relatively small number of conventions and that those conventions can be ignored or broken in a number of meaningful ways.