Black Spots

 Our  written language is full of little black spots: periods, colons, semi-colons, exclamation points, quotation marks and apostrophes et al. None of them are absolutely necessary beyond the twelfth grade. By that time we have read enough of the black spots sprinkled liberally in literature and other less illustrious and astute verbal presentations, to say "I get it" and glibly remove all of them forever. By now, you could eliminate them all from what I just penned, and nothing would hinder your understanding of what is being said. Or is attempted to be so. We don't use little black spots when we speak, so why do we need them in print? Before setting into a rant about tradition and correct grammatical form, think about it. Break out of what was, and think about what could be.  Your English teacher would cluck, "We need punctuation for understanding, my dear; you need to know if such and such belongs to so and so, or if your words are dialogue." "No", would voice, Miss Aiken ( my once wonderful Grade Seven Engish teacher who gave me an A plus 'the first tiime in her life' when I wrote a true story about my grandmother who inadvertantly fell into a shallow creek, mink stole, pearls and all.") a story should be free because  story comes first and worrying about little black spots is something later, called editing." I have just used many little black spots in the previous tale, but if I removed them, as I would love to do with capital "I" forever, you would still understand and perhaps giggle a bit, at my tale. I can see periods have a purpose, but commas and all the rest, are, to me, artificial and de-noting the prime ignorance of reading people who might seem to need them in their lazinessses. Something called "context" ought to make it clear what the intent of the words are, while the spots merely serve to make it only more academically snobbish and yet troublesome, to the keyboarding writers who must adhere to their presence, or their editors won't have jobs. Or Engish teachers, for that matter.  What to do about never more, seeing the little black spots? We elders who've lived long, aren't about to be re-inventing grammatical or other wheels, for example, as are our younger writing humans are busily about daily, but are those of us who have seen a lot of ridiculous things in a lifetime, and actually know what could be changed for the betterment of Man to make Man more able to get on with taking the old and  making the new by eliminating all the old mistakes. Notwithstanding run-on sentences. But no. Usually, everyone wants to plug along on a keyboard that has not been reinvented for a couple of hundred years to still hammer out those little black spots, while little children labour over learning what the black spots are, and how to use them. They waste valuable intellectual time worrying more about little red exes applied by diligent teachers, where they didn't use black spots and instead  went on with their unhinged creative powers so prevalent and rampant in young writers' heads, just waiting to be freed for the sake of the story. When their papers are returned with their bloody exes all over, due in part to missing or wrong black spots here and there, they turn to their cell phones and in a silly series of capital letters and no black spots, and tell their friends they are taking up computer mechanics with spell check and grammar help, rather than hoping as once thought, to become writers.