Punctuation marks. We use them to form our sentences, to turn our incoherent thoughts into organized prose. But what if these signs and symbols had minds of their own?
April is national poetry month! It’s that time of year when we celebrate a genre of writing that most people either love or hate. For those of you who do not know me personally, I fall firmly in the “love” category and spend a decent amount of my free time writing in this genre.
Have you ever looked at a finished piece of writing and wondered how someone could ever write something that amazing? Have you ever looked at one of your own first drafts and wondered how it could ever be something worth reading? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then this is the blog post for you.
Breath-taking beauty awaits you in this rainbow-land of fantastic ideas and colour-splashed coping strategies. Consider how grand it might be to pitch-tent upon the blissful symbolic plains of the subconscious.
Prologue
When I stepped into my role as a Peer Tutor for the Writing and Communication Centre, I came to a profound realization.
Despite speaking English for most of my life, there is still so much I don’t know.
Think back to your first swimming lesson, or the first time you went to the pool. Did you jump in with both feet right away? If so, how did that go? Likely, you got in slowly, or if you decided to take the leap, hopefully someone caught you before you got into trouble. Now think of an Olympic swimmer like Katie Ledecky or Penny Oleksiak. How do they get in the water at the start of a race? When the buzzer goes off, there’s no time to use the ladder.
A thesaurus groups together words that are similar in meaning. It exists for those tip-of-the-tongue moments when the right word seems just out of reach: “Gah! I need another word for something that’s pretentious … to be pretentious, to put on airs … Ah! An affectation!”
