Icecano Style Guide: Megacommas

Like toy cartoons from the early 80s, we try to maintain a certain amount of educational content here on Icecano to make sure the FCC doesn’t pull our broadcast license. As such, we offer this excerpt from the Icecano Style Guide!

Everyone knows the simple “comma” punctuation mark. English also has a variety of what experts call “megacommas”, punctuation marks that are like commas, but “more so”. Like many parts of English, the rules for using these bizarre symbols are inscrutable, complex, and originally stolen from another language.

Commas, of course, are the easy one: Officially, they’re used to “separate clauses in a sentence”, whatever that means, but most people know the shortcut is to use them in a sentence whenever you’d stop to breathe.

Are there similar advices for the other megacommas? As my high schooler found out earlier today by accidentally asking me a question, and as you are about to find out now: yes! There are simple “what you’d do while talking” guidelines for using these that “big grammar” doesn’t want you to know! They are as follows:

Em Dashes: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you’d point a Harrison Ford finger at the other person as you were saying the part between the dashes.

Parentheses: if you were saying this out loud, the stuff in the parentheses is what you’d turn your head and say to the person next to you to get them caught up.

Semi-Colon: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you lose your train of thought and start talking about something else.

En Dash: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you say “ummm” before continuing.

Hypen: if you were saying this out loud, this is where you’d forget to pause between words and mash them together like one of those German compound words.

Square Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this is the part you’d mutter to yourself.

Curly Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this would denote a scope, and variables defined here would not be accessable to the rest of what you were saying.

Angle Brackets: if you were saying this out loud, this would be the part translated from Russian.

We hope this has been of assistance.