This just in: Comma shortage hits TrekWeb!
By Cap'n Calhoun

THE INTERNET -- Today a shortage of punctuation led to nearly unreadable articles the world over. Notably, the popular Star Trek fan site "TrekWeb" suffered when a lengthy review by O. Deus was rendered nearly unreadable due to this grammatical tragedy.

First, the appositives suffered:
Quote:
The final third part of the Vulcan arc is the most action packed of the three paying off on much of the material that had been set up by the far slower and often more turgid previous two episodes.

Then they combined with compound sentences in a tragedy that still has left thousands unable to follow simple sentences.

Quote:
Ultimately a lot of the action scenes such as Archer fighting the Vulcans as T'Pol is captured are superfluous and really don't do much for the story but they still speed up the pace and make the episode flow quicker at the very least as a substitute for much of the pointless arguments that characterized Awakening.

Read how a few simple sentences from this article would have benefitted greatly were these markers available:

Quote:
The highlight of the episode, though, is, unsurprisingly enough, Shran , who, thanks to Jeffrey Combs always wonderful performances, immediately brings life to any scene or episode.

Alas, O. Deus' nearly unlimited supply of appositives still renders the sentence nearly unreadable even when more thoroughly punctuated. Also, the as yet unbroken shortage of aprostraphes prevents Jeffrey Combs from truly posessing his own performances in the above statement.

The sad truth is, however, that even all of the commas in the world may not have been able to save TrekWeb readers from run-on sentences such as the following excerpt:

Quote:
Indeed Shran's scenes with Ambassador Soval are the most compelling moments that Kir'Shara or any episode in the three part arc or for that matter this season have to offer and are highly reminiscent of Garak's interrogations of Odo.

But, still, having included such phrases as "of course" in comma-delimited appositives would have helped readers to no end.

Quote:
This is of course somewhat ironic since these scenes also stray from the episode's format of 'Archer with Surak in his Head Saves Vulcan' but at the same time point the way to something far deeper which is Andorian and Vulcan reconciliation.

Further horrid examples flowed on and on to such an extent that to list them here would result in an article longer than the original. Periods were sometimes employed in order to make the topics far more readable, with the only downside being a few sentences that began with conjunctions.

Quote:
He's not acting like a Vulcan or even a Romulan but every villain cliche in the book right down to detaining a minister who protests against his actions. And of course his downfall comes in cliched villain style as Archer and T'Pau saunter into the room and put everything to rights in a matter of minutes.

Although any grammar teacher would cringe at such things, they have been found to be acceptable on occasion. Grammatical blunders continued until a small supply of commas that had been flown in saved much of the rest of the article. True some were omitted, and others were used in the places of periods or semicolons...

Quote:
In Awakening Surak claimed that even Syran himself was too corrupted to properly be the guardian of his teachings, by Kir'Shara simply flashing some of Surak's teaching on a holographic screen was enough to end all the violence.

...but, eventually, some found their proper places...

Quote:
It's possible to quibble that humans are once again getting foolishly involved in a conflict between two species, either of which could blow the Enterprise to bits, but the door closed on that particular objection years ago.

...while others attempted to form appositives, but were foiled by a lack of teamwork with other commas, whereas periods filled the places of still others...

Quote:
Still Enterprise attacking a Vulcan cruiser, considering the disparity in firepower hangs on the lunatic fringe. As it taking sides in a conflict in which neither side is all that clean.

We're hoping that this shortage will end soon, once again resulting in readable articles everywhere. Hopefully this news item has not used the remaining supply of commas, but U.N. forces will soon be shipping in more, following their recent successful shipments of consonants to Ethiopia and the subsequent shipment of vowels to Bosnia (see article). While some may say that any article is doomed to face some grammatical errors (just as I'm sure this one has as well) and certainly there are some areas where comma usage is worthy of debate, hopefully such large scale tragedies as this can be prevented in the future.
Reported by wise guy on TrekWeb.