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In truth, I suspect many still get drunk at symposia. And we had a few such desks at secondary school… but if anyone put ink in the hole, it was in cartridge form. It's been a long time since then, and I can't recall the punctuation advice, but in general I use the oratorical pause method.

Commas may be under-used in initial drafts, as people try to get their thoughts down. Nowadays, though, the first draft is often the final draft – especially with material published online. When editing news, I find I'm more often inserting punctuation than removing it, especially for run-on sentences.

The elephant in the room is the semicolon, which has entirely disappeared in some quarters. There are plenty here, of course; but Flayrah and its target audience tends to prefer longer sentences to start with. I'm also a big fan of the en-dash.

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