I think it’s time to come out of the closet and admit I’m in love—with punctuation. I keep hearing people say punctuation is dying. And who cares? Who needs it, anyway? Super-casual writing like texting and chatting is here to stay. Using punctuation at all in a text-message is a pain in the rear-end. A semi-colon in a text? Forget it. The trouble is, ideas have to be pretty simple to get away with killing off all your punctuation. That’s ok for a quick chat—if you don’t care if anybody really understands you—but what about books and essays, which require more complicated thinking than lol and jk? My favorite punctuation mark, the poor semi-colon, has suffered the worst punctuation slaughter; nobody seems to know how to use it at all. I’ve seen at least one girl stare at it like it’s a spider crawling across the page. Girl, pointing to a semi-colon: “What the (bleep) is that?” Me: “It’s a semi-colon.” Girl: “Unh. What’s it do? I don’t like it. Get it away!” “It’s intimidating,” a frie...