There's a disturbing trend I've noticed. People are becoming less and less able to properly express themselves via a written medium and this goes hand-in-hand with an increased emphasis on email and text-messaging. It's as if a wild fire is spreading and people are sheltering themselves behind drums of gasoline.

Behold: The period.

And so, since I love humanity, I am going to offer the first part of what I hope is a series on grammar lessons for the common man. By the end, everyone should understand what a subordinate clause is. I know you're just quivering with excitement over subordinate clauses, but this first article is going to focus on punctuation marks.

While the number of punctuation marks in the wild is truly staggering: a scholar from the ancient library in Alexandria claims to have counted 471,229, though many have gone extinct due to overhunting and habitat destruction. Today, the number of punctuation marks we have successfully domesticated is considerably less: fourteen. But even that is far too many to digest in a single lesson, so for the remainder of this article, we're going to focus on the most important one: the period (and the two major derivatives thereof).

The Period
The period is a little dot that sort of goes on the lower right. Undoubtedly, you've seen many of them in your lifetime of reading and I hope you will see many more. For the period is truly a fine example of the triumph of grace through simplicity in an ever more complicated world. People are figuring out how to manipulate corn into fueling cars, entire nations are collapsing into strife and money has simultaneously become both too scarce and too plentiful and yet the period remains a dot. You just can't fuck that up.

And its uses are the polar opposite of its complexity. Want to tell someone something? Use a period. Want to give your fingers a break from typing for so long? Use a period. Want to make something seem important? Use. A. Lot. Of. Periods. More than anything else, the period is your go-to guy. He can get you out of any belletristic bind.

The Ellipsis
The ellipsis is three or more periods who have herded together for safety. They are most commonly seen populating the blogs of middle schoolers:

i want to once and for all settle this nonsense……..just a few things are wrong with what people have been saying……. first off… i did not kiss brad… he kissed me… NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND……….. so just STOP saying that stuff….

Though it is composed of periods, the ellipsis has fused on a molecular level and have become an inseparable, symbiotic organism in an identical manner to the cell's relationship to mitochondria. Or those birds that clean crocodile's teeth.

Though the period's use is encouraged, the ellipsis should be used sparingly. This is because the ellipsis is commonly used by stupid people and you don't want to seem stupid. But sometimes, you just need to dumb something up a bit.

The Exclamation Point
The exclamation point is to the period what a man is to that same man wearing an Abraham Lincoln-esque stovepipe hat: just better in every way. Exclamation points are an instant party for any sentence, but you should use this power sparingly. Showing up at a get together with a mini-keg is awesome once in a while, but it loses its flair quickly if abused.

Well, that covers it for our first grammar lesson. You should walk away not knowing how to use punctuation better but knowing why you use punctuation — a far more valuable skill.

After all, any monkey can learn how to do something, but only a savvy human can figure out why.