Tying Up a Few Loose "Ands"

And a one and a two and a three…

The paragraph pictured above has and, & and and on hand. Tri-and? Try again. The first and can stay, but keep your other two ands off this sentence.

Did the writer’s overuse of and — spelled out and in symbol form — create confusion? And how! The best of us have written “and and” from time to time, but I’m flummoxed by the insertion of an ampersand — an and stand-in — in that and span. Symbols don’t often appear in lieu of the words they represent in the body of newspaper articles. They don’t often show up in blogs, either.

At × though, they do. A small % of writers think symbols are > words. I’m not so sure I agree, but I decided to try this approach for ~ ½ of today’s post. The treatment has its +s. When done proficiently, a # of words, like toxins during a : cleansing, are removed. The ™ of any good writer is the use of @ least 3 symbols per sentence, and 10 symbols in one sentence is the Au standard. During a brief . in the late ‘90s, I averaged a dozen symbols per paragraph, which was best in my age [. In literary circles, I was a *; I had no =. Enough boasting. It’s time for me to —. If my plan worked, I managed to elicit a :) from at least one reader. Was that you? It was? Ah, that’s ♫ to my ears.