I was retiring from this business for good, and everyone knew it, but the money was too good for me to say no. Every instinct screamed that this was too dangerous, but I told myself, “Just one more job, and I’m out of this dirty, inky, miserable business forever.”
Looking at the job before me, I could see why everyone else had turned it down. As you get older, it becomes important to just go home to your family with your hands clean. It was important to me, too, and that’s what I’ll do. I’ll just have to put my head down and get through this.
I start at the very beginning, because you’ve got to start somewhere. First, I nailed down that first letter, a G, and turned twisted it into a capital. Too easy. This was going to be a milk run. Then, three words in, I hit my first wrinkle. It was a short dependant clause, and it’s this sort of thing that sorts the men from the grammar-school boys. Some fellas leave this sort of stuff alone. Leave it to the reader to work it out, they argue. It’s always easier to leave problems for other people, but if this was going to be my final job, I was going to do it properly; I put in the comma before the first subject. My hand didn’t even shake.
But this isn’t the time to get lazy. The subject of the sentence was “spring”, the name of the season. This was amateur-bait if ever I saw it. So left it alone and moved on. I didn’t have time to let my guard down though. Some fool had left a comma before the word “that”, when “that” was restricting the noun. Perhaps it was a trap. Either way, I wasn’t going to fall for that chestnut. Braver soul, the real heroes, might have switched out the “that” for a “which” but I’m just here to punctuate and go home. I just erased the comma and got about my business.
Terrific, I said to myself, looking at the words. I exhaled slowly, letting the horror sink in. This is exactly why I should have had the good sense to just walk away, and let some other sucker break his back on this one. But there it was in all its glory: a run-on sentence and a parenthetical clause, all without a single punctuation mark in sight. I mean, you can go your whole career without hitting something this bad. I’d heard about the Torez case back in eighty-three, we all had. But you just hope that something like this will never come across your desk.
Of course I could have just slapped some brackets around that parenthetical and moved on, but that’s not my way. Brackets are for little kids and hacks, and that’s not the way people are going to remember me. I’ve come too far. I move in with the em-dashes and, because the parenthetical clause is a whole sentence – subject, predicate, the whole deal – I capitalise the first letter. That was close, but this is not time to go soft.
Now for the run-on sentence. I could use a semi-colon; it’s not like it had never been done. Hell, we’ve all done it. But it’s literary and showy, and that’s not what the big bucks are for. It kills me to be so blunt, but I just drop in a full-stop and capitalise the next word to start a new sentence. Art is for writers. I’m just here for the grammar and punctuation.
I’m almost there, and then I see it: the word “they”. It’s the plural pronoun and it’s referring to a specific and defined group of people. The text-books will tell you that this is a simple case of anaphora, but that’s not the half of it. This is a shit-storm in a cup. If I leave it there, the grammar police – those humourless, pedantic bastards – will never let me rest, even once I’m retired. Their apostrophe-spotting ways will be put aside while they bury me in snark. It’s a real conundrum but I keep it together. If I leave the plural pronoun for a single team, it will upset the pedants, for sure. But if I change it to the singular non-gendered pronoun, it, then it will throw the readers.
I should have just walked away, money be damned. I look furtively from side to side, and then just leave it. I’ll come back to it. I will.
Before I do that, there are two things left: a list, and terminal punctuation. The terminal punctuation is easy to decide. Ellipses are for the weak, and an exclamation might work well for school-girls, but that’s not the way I roll. So I slam down a full-stop.
Time to clear the decks before I go. I look at the list and the truth is simple: it only needs a single comma to be understood by the reader. But, God help me, I’m going to put in the Oxford comma. Only the old timers do it now, and I could fight my nature, but I’ve come so far, too far to get scared now.
I skip back to that “they”. The pedants will have a conniption. They’ll hunt me down. Everything I’ve ever written on the internet will now get drowned in snippy comments. But you’ve to be true to something. Folks who don’t know will claim that you can just check a style guide, but that’s just naive. Ultimately, you’ve got to have your own grammatical compass and mine says that the “they” stands. “It” would just throw the reader, and I’ve come too far, added too many O’s to a to, to back down now.