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which you used parallel structures. Can you find potholes — some unparallel phrases or sentences — that jar the reader?
    2. Notice parallel language in novels, in creative nonfiction, in journalism. When you find a passage, underline the parallel structures with a pencil. Discuss the effects of parallelism on the reader.
    3. Just for fun, take parallel slogans or sayings and rewrite the last element. For example, John, Paul, George, and that drummer who wears the rings.
    4. By fiddling with parallel structures, you might discover that an occasional violation of parallelism — a twist at the end — can lend a humorous imbalance to a sentence. Give it a try.
    Some teach punctuation using technical distinctions, such as the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. Not here. I prefer tools, not rules. My preference shows no disrespect for the rules of punctuation. They help the writer and the reader as long as everyone remembers that such rules are arbitrary, determined by consensus, convention, and culture.
    If you check the end of that last sentence, you will notice that I used a comma before "and" to end a series. For a quarter century, we at the Poynter Institute have argued about that comma. Fans of Strunk and White (that's me!) put it in. Thrifty journalists take it out. As an American, I spell the word color "color," and I place the comma inside the quotation marks. My cheeky English friend spells it "colour", and she leaves that poor little croissant out in the cold.
    Most punctuation is required, but some is optional, leaving the writer with many choices. My modest goal is to highlight those choices, to transform the formal rules of punctuation into useful tools.
    Punctuation comes from the Latin root punctus, or "point." Those funny dots, lines, and squiggles help writers point the way. To help readers, we punctuate for two reasons:
    1. To set the pace of reading.
    2. To divide words, phrases, and ideas into convenient groupings.
    You will punctuate with power and purpose when you begin to consider pace and space.
    Think of a long, well-written sentence with no punctuation except the period. Such a sentence is a straight road with a stop sign at the end. The period is the stop sign. Now think of a winding road with lots of stop signs. That analogy describes a paragraph with lots of periods, an effect that will slow the pace of the story. The writer may desire such a pace for strategic reasons: to achieve clarity, convey emotion, or create suspense.
    If a period is a stop sign, then what kind of traffic flow is created by other marks? The comma is a speed bump; the semicolon is what a driver education teacher calls a "rolling stop"; the parenthetical expression is a detour; the colon is a flashing yellow light that announces something important up ahead; the dash is a tree branch in the road.
    A writer once told me that he knew it was time to hand in a story when he had reached this stage: "I would take out all the commas. Then I would put them all back." The comma may be the most versatile of marks and the one most closely associated with the writer's voice. A well-placed comma points to where the writer would pause if he read the passage aloud. "He may have been a genius, as mutations sometimes are." The author of that line is Kurt Vonnegut. I have heard him speak, and that central comma is his voice.
    More muscular than the comma, the semicolon is most useful for dividing and organizing big chunks of information. In his essay "The Lantern-Bearers," Robert Louis Stevenson describes an adventure game in which boys wore cheap tin lanterns — called bull's-eyes — under their coats:
    We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They
    smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with