I've worked as a professional writer and editor for several years (mostly small-time periodicals and business writing, nothing to brag about), so maybe I could offer some advice.
Are you familiar with
The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White? This book talks some about use of punctuation among many other useful subjects. I don't have it handy, but based on my experience, people sometimes use punctuation to indicate timing, pauses, etc. Often it's not necessary.
In your post, all I would change is taking out the ellipsis, like this:
So what I'm asking is this: what would be the best way to tighten up my grammar so I don't write so much like I speak -- any ideas?Or you could put a question mark after "speak" and have "Any ideas?" as a sentence, even though my high school English teacher would have counted off for that.
I checked some of your other posts, and they looked fine to me. Often--particularly in an informal setting like DU--writing like you speak is not a bad thing. It can be a good way to hook readers in and make them feel comfortable with your prose.
Of course, if you're talking about more formal writing, as for publication, you would probably want to be more cautious.
Another good reference is
The Careful Writer by Theodore M. Bernstein. It's wide-ranging, comprehensive, and often funny, which never hurts. Also excellent are these writing books by Karen Elizabeth Gordon:
The Transitive Vampire (grammar) and
The Well-Tempered Sentence (punctuation). Gordon's books are a ton of fun and very lucid and informative.
I guess as far as the punctuation thing goes (my English teacher is cringing in her grave over that phrase!), I'd get familiar with the uses of commas, dashes, parentheses, and ellipses.
Forgive me if I'm covering familiar territory here.
You should use the ellipsis to indicate a deletion from quoted material,
not a pause or a trailing off of thought. For example:
Clarke told Stahl, "I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues...in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber...." (Note that the second one, the "terminal ellipsis," has four periods because there's the ellipsis to indicate missing material and then the period at the end of the sentence.)
By the way, I would never criticize you for calling the ellipsis "the thing with three dots," although my English teacher would. (I would also never criticize you for calling the hyphen "the thing with two dots.")
Also, dashes, parentheses, and "parenthetical commas" are used to set off material. They have different shades of meaning. Dashes tend to emphasize the information, parentheses tend to de-emphasize it, and commas are usually more neutral. At least that's the theory I was taught, and it seems to hold up most of the time.
For example:
Scalia flung back his fishing rod to cast into the river--not bothering to look around him--and promptly embedded his fishing lure in Cheney's head.Condoleeza Rice (who was recently appointed a professor emeritus at the University of Satan) professes an admiration for Ku Klux Klan founder Stonewall Jackson.Bush, whose administration has run up a record national debt, continues to blast Kerry for looking French.Anyway, I've probably given you 20 gallons when all you wanted was an ounce, but I hope this is of some use.
Mainly, my advice is to get familiar enough with mechanics and rules so that they don't get in the way, but then focus your energies on subject matter above all else. And don't be afraid to produce what Anne Lamott so eloquently refers to as "shitty first drafts."
Keep on writin'.
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