Punctuation is...fun?!

Last Friday, I did an entire lesson on punctuation. The focus was on the use of the comma, semi-colon and colon. I always get nervous at the thought of having to teach this subject as it can be as dry as dust. To my amazement, however, there was laughter in the classroom since some of the examples in the handouts and some that I came up with on the spur of the moment were actually amusing.

At the end of the lesson, I said, "I hope a few lights have gone in your head now." And to my surprise, one student agreed wholeheartedly. And the two 16-year-olds in the group laughed and said it had been fun and that it would be useful for their creative writing. 

I can honestly say that no-one has ever called punctuation fun. Well, not since Victor Borge's sketch on phonetic punctuation, which is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf_TDuhk3No

To explain the colon, I used the sound 'da da dahhhhh' to show that that piece of punctuation could be used to dramatic effect. I like to believe that now, whenever anyone in that class comes across a colon in a text, they will hear the sound 'da da dahhhh'.