Reading Punctuations

In other words, how is your audience receiving your words? 

I thought about this today because when I was minoring in poetry back in college, almost everything I wrote was made for performance. Growing up I couldn't stand the sound of someone else reading my work out load, it was like nails on a chalkboard! 

The biggest problem I had to correct in college was using punctuation. I never did because I'd know the voices of my poems. The problem was, no one could read my mind. I started singing with very strict classical training when I was 5. I wrote things in the way I heard them in my head. It doesn't help anyone else! So therefore, I had to start learning how to write poetry with punctuation, and once I jumped into that pool, I was in the deep end. 

There's a lot that you can use for punctuation. Sure there's periods, commas, semicolons, but I started playing with other things. I threw in parentheses and read them like subscripts. I started using hyphens or super sudden stops. A couple times I even modified words with apostrophes, so my readers could get as close to reading it in the right voice as they could. 

Hyphens were on the left and the right, jarring for the crescendo and commas let the words fall softly and drawn out.

What's the most creative thing you've done with punctuation? Do you have a style with how you use punctuation? 

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