How do you feel about punctuation? Is it useful, essential, or a pain?

Thanks Didge;))

You might not believe me but i understood that, Ancient. :)

My wife went back to school as a mature age student then on to university. She showed me an assignment her anatomy lecturer had given her and said, can you work this out? It was a full A4 page that started with a capital letter and ended witj a full stop. The rest just continued in the manner of your sisters in law. (It's OK, Randy, I left the hyphens out on purpose.) I re-wrote the page dividing it into four paragraphs with three sentences in each and gave it back to her. She said, "Oh, is that what it means?" It was all but unintelligible.

I really think punctuation is essential to make the meaning of each sentence clear.  Without properly placed modifiers, the result is confusion about the subject.  If we don't know the subject of a sentence, all meaning is lost.  Punctuation allows us to breeze through the text while understanding a whole lot more than the main idea.
a single comma can change the meaning of a sentence.  How can we leave them out!

Hi Teach, it's so good to hear from you. I thought you'd given us away and that'd be a shame. I'm optimistic that our friend from Washington (WA not DC) might join us, She has other things on her mind at present but hasn't ruled it out. She'd be very popular here. 

And I got to read it. Thanks for the interesting answer, Ancient One. (Hope you're enjoying life on aMug.)

Me too.  I really want a plain layout.

That's a pretty good description, Ancient One. Still, we moved from city to town when Ask closed; now we've moved back to the big smoke. I took a few days to find my feet but I like it. 

You got that right. I was sorry to see Walter crash and burn with his first two posts here. He had closed his account before the ink was dry. Well, maybe not ink, but before the pixels were in place.

I guess that was bound to happen. Still, a good grounding is useful.

He really taught me a lot and it helped when I was writing papers in school and later when I was on the job.  

Not all sentences are that simple and there are places where the semi-colon really is needed. Rule of thumb: if it makes comprehension easier, I'll put it in. Rules are there for clarity.

I still disagree.  Colon is much better than semicolon.
The rules of the hyphen get pretty dumb too.   Semicolon and semi-colon both being correct for the compound word is an example. The English language really should update to more clear cut rules. Just like how a possessive is formed with an apostrophe most of the time but not all of the time.   That's stupid.
I hear you though.  I'll skip punctuation sometimes on simple or silly musings to create a  dialect effect but try hard to get it right when being serious.

Some punctuation marks are a pain to use on touchscreens because of the keyboard toggling  so I kinda get why people use spaces instead of periods and commas at times.

In an assignment for my creative writing course I once wrote an article that contain a flashback, then another flashback within the first one -- something like a set of Matryoshka dolls. They really needed past perfect tense but it would have been too clumsy to read, so I started each section with the past perfect then dropped back to simple past tense.

I asked my tutor for an opinion and he said that I'd done the right thing. His suggestion was to break the rules for the sake of clarity when I thought it was necessary. 

That's how I feel about punctuation. I use it the way it feels right and I know that I often break the rules -- sometimes intentionally, sometimes because I don't know all the rules. I appreciate your answer and comments and it's certainly not my intention to suggest that I'm right and you're wrong. This is just what seems to work for me. 

I'm not trying to say who's right or wrong either.  I feel the same way about it. Just being crusty cause it's more fun.

On Randy D's behalf may I ask whether that should have been 'cause (with an apostrophe)?

Yup.

Hard to know where (under whom) to put this comment.

I can do a lot around the house with a hammer, a screwdriver, and a pair of pliers.

But if I am repairing a watch, I'm going to need tools more suited to the item I am working on.

Same with using language to convey a precise thought.

Punctuation is the hands of a master is the difference between your toddler's piano and a Steinway; and until you have heard both, it's hard to understand what I am talking about.  (Semicolon required in the previous sentence.)