There’s a special place familiar to ev’ry teacher who helps beginning writers improve their writing by starting with the things that the kids have written and teaching them to edit and revise and make it better but this special place exists in the works of children who don’t use any periods when they’re writing so ev’rything they write is just one long sentence that stretches to infinity and suddenly we find ourselves traipsing through the Land of No Punctuation where ev’rything’s a segue to something else and ubiquitous conjunctions blend ev’ry tale into one big stream-of-consciousness rambling soliloquy stretching through the Land of No Punctuation where ev’rything’s a run-on and no one ever has time to take a breath or to stop and think which is better than the Land of No Inflection which is monotone and flat and there’s no differentiation between someone saying “I just hit the jackpot” or “I just learned I have cancer” or “I think I’ll have a salad” or “I hate you all” but anyway we’re sprawling through the Land of No Punctuation defying all the armies of writing teachers who want you to conform to their silly rules about periods and commas and colons and quotation marks semicolons question marks brackets exclamation marks dashes and apostrophes hyphens and parentheses slashes and ellipses and Heaven knows what else . . .

Wouldn’t it be nice to take a break?
To have a pause?
Have time to think?
Wouldn’t it be nice to simply breathe?
Conclude a thought?
Begin anew?

But no . . .

As long as there’s the Land of No Punctuation then kids will always know that it’s safe to write all their rambling adventures and tortured stories with dialogue that lurches from character to character with nothing to distinguish which character is saying it where plots are full of holes and effects don’t follow causes and nouns are not specific and no one uses adverbs and grammar is atrocious and ev’rything’s misspelled and the story has no climax it just ends.