As a graduate student from the writing program working at IDD, I often wonder how much time it makes sense to devote to copy editing the online-course syllabi and modules that come across my desk. I sometimes think I’m being too stringent in my attempts to apply the rules of the Chicago Manual of Style. I have a tendency to get lost for upwards of half an hour at a time trying to resolve ambiguities of correct hyphen and comma use. (I’m still not sure if I should use a comma before a coordinating conjunction connecting two imperative clauses.)

Generally, the amount of attention that gets paid to a certain text’s punctuation, grammar, and accuracy is proportional to the number of people we expect to read it. An article in a national news magazine is rigorously scrutinized while an e-mail to officemates may not be reread once. Given that logic, it doesn’t seem to make sense to go over every course module with a fine-toothed comb.

However, I think everyone involved in producing a class should have a healthy amount of fear of students misunderstanding the course content. I bring this up because I think there’s a sense that proper grammar and punctuation, while important in order to appear professional, are purely cosmetic—at best only necessary to make a text easier to read. But something as simple as a hyphen or a capital letter can make a sentence mean something entirely different than what is intended.

In neither speech nor writing is meaning in the words alone. For example, in speech, we can distinguish the White House, the building where the president lives, from a generic house that happens to be white, by using stressed and unstressed syllables. “The white house” is not the same “the white house.” Say it out loud; you’ll hear the difference.

While we use and interpret stressed syllables naturally in speech, in writing, we have to rely on visual elements to make sure our audience reads the sentence the way it is intended. When these are absent or inconsistent, the writer loses control of what the reader interprets.

If, for example, someone referred to the syllabus for an online course as “the online course syllabus,” there’s a very real chance that the reader could interpret it instead as a course syllabus that is online, possibly assuming we are talking about a face-to-face course in which the professor posted the syllabus on Blackboard.

To prevent this kind of miscommunication, the phrase must be hyphenated as “online-course syllabus” because the words “online course” function as a compound adjective to modify “syllabus.”

Perhaps I am trying too hard to justify my existence as a writing student working at IDD. But since instructors are often trying to differentiate subtle shades of meaning and convey complicated ideas, I think every effort should be made to eliminate the potential for this kind of misinterpretation. Remember that in asynchronous learning it’s harder for students to ask and get answers to questions when they’re confused.

Of course, much of the time, students will be able to tell what you mean by context, but not always. And I think we should be on the lookout for the situations where a comma, a hyphen, or a capital letter can keep students from misunderstanding the class concepts.