Punctuation Matters

Sometimes, to stress the importance of punctuation (mostly in past university-level classes), I have written the following line on the whiteboard and asked students to copy it down and punctuate it:

woman without her man is nothing

Two primary, yet opposing, options are as follows:

1. Woman, without her man, is nothing.

2. Woman! Without her, man is nothing!

It's interesting sometimes to see which students get emotional about the differences in meaning.



Here's another. Kinda PC version.

A koala bear walks into a restaurant and tells the host, "I'm starving! I want a hamburger."

The host says, "Hey! This is a restaurant. We don't serve animals here."

The Koala bear says, "I don't care. I'm hungry. Bring me a burger." He goes over to a table and sits down.

The host sighs, thinking it's not worth the trouble, plus he'll have a good story about a talking bear, and tells the waiter to bring the koala a hamburger.

10 minutes later the waiter brings the koala a burger. The koala eats it, then asks for the check. When the waiter brings him the check, the koala pulls out a gun and shoots the waiter.

The host is horrified. "No!" he shouts. "You can't do that!"

"Yes, I can," says the koala. "I'm a koala bear. Look it up in the dictionary."

The koala leaves the restaurant, and the host pulls out a dictionary.

The dictionary reads: "Koala bear: eats shoots and leaves."



How do you punctuate the definition? 3 verbs (eats, shoots, and leaves) or 1 verb and 2 nouns (eats shoots and leaves)?