Humour: PUNCTUATION
A Professor of English wrote the words
woman without her man is a savage
. . . on the blackboard and directed his students to punctuate it correctly.
The men wrote: "Woman, without her man, is a savage."
The women wrote: "Woman: Without her, man is a savage."
The serious point behind the joke
I keep that old gag on file because it teaches a real lesson better than any lecture could. The same eight words, punctuated two ways, say two opposite things. Punctuation is not decoration. It is meaning.
You will meet the same trap in real copy every week. "Let's eat, Grandma" is an invitation to dinner. "Let's eat Grandma" is a confession to cannibalism. One little comma stands between the two. There is a famous grammar book named after the panda that "eats, shoots and leaves", which is a joke about exactly this: move one comma and a gentle leaf-eater becomes a gunman.
In journalism the stakes are higher than a laugh. A comma in the wrong place in a court report, a contract or a quote can change who did what to whom. It can land you in front of an editor explaining yourself, or worse, in front of a lawyer. So read every sentence aloud, listen for where it pauses, and put the marks where the meaning tells you to. When a sentence can be read two ways, rewrite it so it can only be read one way.
That is the whole craft in a nutshell: be clear, be exact, and never make the reader guess.