Freshman English major Lisa Joosten lifted her Frankensteinian amalgamation of a scholarly paper, kissed it and beamed a bright smile.

“I am so getting an A on this,” Joosten said to herself. “In fact, I could probably send this to a journal and have it published.”

Joosten, with her positivity and confidence in that moment of rereading her own work, repressed the obvious yet harsh reality that the scholarly paper – titled “Hellfire and Back; French Imperialism in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities; Dickens’ Great Expectations” – teemed with way too many semicolons. Optimism prevented the poor eager scholar from realizing the exorbitant amount of what author Kurt Vonnegut lovingly referred to as the “transvestites of punctuation.”

If only the poor girl saw.

“Ah, man, this is going to be good,” Joosten said as she smiled at her creation, unaware that the amount of misplaced and misused semicolons likely made the gods above cry. “This is why I came to college. I came to show just how intelligent I can be.”

When English professor Katie Tannenbaum finally read Joosten’s work – a child only a mother could love, in all honesty – she could merely stare at it in awe.

“I-I don’t think this first sentence ever ends,” Tannenbaum muttered, her left eye twitching at the sight of so many semicolons stitched into the piece. “This is one large, giant, planetary sentence.”