Purposeful Punctuation - empahsis on purposeful

I found this section fairly useful. I have always punctuated using only commas and end punctuation, but I had never really considered it a problem. After reading the section and seeing the different options laid out all together like that, I have come to realize that other punctuation can give my writing more clarity. The key is the idea of using it purposefully. I didn't find the exercises at all useful, because I didn't write the sentence. I couldn't know how to use punctuation to deliberately make the point, since the point wasn't mine. That said, I can absolutely see how dashes and semicolons could be useful tools for showing connections. I still don't think my writing was necessary deficient, but I do think I had more options available to me than I realized. Without these other punctuation marks, I was consistently forced into a situation of have to rewrite sentences to make them clearer. A lot of times I just decided to break them into two sentences, which could easily result in choppy-sounding writing. I suppose the other side of that coin is that even with revision, the sentences in exercise 63 are a bit confusing and could easily benefit from being rewritten into two separate sentences. And here my great epiphany: The nice thing about understanding how to use punctuation purposefully is that it gives you the option to separate or combine sentences, rather than forcing the necessity on you.

As a side note, you might have noticed that I really like the use of italics. I don't think it should be used all the time, but I do think it is often a much more direct way of showing emphasis than awkward there clefts and what not. Plus, the emphasis can totally change the meaning of a sentence while still sounding natural. If writing is code for speech, then it seems to me that italics are an excellent way to encode emphasis. Anyway, this is all really beside the point, and I'm not even sure I've ever been told not to do it, so I don't know why I'm acting like it's this great debate.