As I launch this blog, Margie Holds Court, it is my hope that it will be a place where we can share our love of this language.
As I approach the winding down of my teaching career -- I started as a high school Spanish teacher in 1964!! You do the math -- I want to talk about the way this language works and the marvelous opportunity we have to play with it and use it and dissect it every day in this world we call court reporting. We use the language in a unique way in this field. We worry and fret over every comma and hyphen, and let’s not even talk about what to quote and whether to use a dash or a colon.
It is my hope that you will jump in and respond here. After all, where else do you get to talk to people that love/hate the same stuff you do? I know we won’t always agree, and that’s okay. There is certainly enough room to wiggle in some places. But there are rules!
I have to share this quote from Facebook, where someone said something like “But it doesn’t look good with a comma.” James Barker, of Searchmaster, replied, “We are not decorating the den; we are punctuating the transcript.” Punctuating the transcript, indeed.
Happy punctuating.
Margie