50 claps from my iPhone Roz Warren for this funny piece!

Thanks for the heads up too. When I was editor of Mary Hitchcock Hospital’s employee newsletter Contact, my boss in our PR Department, a self-proclaimed German Stomping Boot-wearing bitch (okay, the last descriptor is mine) insisted that I use dashes — like this!

What I like about the tools of parentheses and dashes is their ability to create an aside, a signal to our dear readers that this is a shift in time or perspective. (Like an in-joke, it establishes trust better than shared gossip.)

My Mom ended her sentences with exclamation points. Like this! But that early training died with my high school English class es— God bless Mrs. McCurdy! (I still talk to her.)

Now if we could just get our editors to explain where they’re coming from, and what their rules and violations of those rules mean to them — it may be too much to ask, but we can darn well try!