If you don’t have the time to write a novel in November but have a hankering to do some creative writing, you might like this prompt I used for American Lit. My students are reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, just in time to cheer them up for Thanksgiving. The novel tells a post-nuclear holocaust story about a father and son trying to survive as scavengers in a hostile landscape. It’s like Jack London mixed with radiation. My class has been doing a lot of literary analysis this semester. It was time for something creative. 
The Untimely Typewriter:Daily Writings Against the Tides of Distraction 
Seeing as how this is inspired by Cormac McCarthy, I presume punctuation is optional? 🙂
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Anything goes after the apocalypse. In all seriousness, I was thinking about his punctuation today. In The Road, he uses apostrophes for some contractions but not others. It gets one thinking about what parts of our language really aren’t necessary.
On another note, I think English should steal the upside down question marks used in Spanish. It makes perfect sense.
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I like to leave out unused letters of words in English, and I recently read somewhere about why we should leave out the extra letters.
Leaving out punctuation can be confusing.
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If clarity is the main point, then most punctuation is necessary. Not all commas for introductory clauses are necessary. The Oxford comma isn’t always needed (albeit I prefer it). My students, like most people, have a dickens of a time with commas. Understanding commas requires close reading.
For creative writing, where semantic playfulness or intentional confusion might be the point, punctuation rules could be subverted. Stream-of-consciousness is a good example.
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I may do that just for kicks. Your post reminds me of one of Robert Messengers where each of his blog readers got to type a part of a short story. Turn this into a challenge and let each reader submit a typewritten response. Manual typewriters will still work as will pencils and pens after destruction of most else unless they happened to be at or too close to ground zero where nothing will exist.
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That sounds fun. I guess I posted this because I’m in the mood to write, but I don’t have the time for a long project. I might post some more exercises just for the hell of it.
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I’d enjoy being one of your students, I’m sure.
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Thanks, Richard. I was tempted to have them read some CHT stories. By the way, more news about Deep Fakes the other day. Your story is coming too close to reality.
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