Once upon a time, in a quiet village, there was a schoolteacher named Mrs. Smith, who was known for her strictness and her obsession with the rules of grammar. She was a lover of punctuation, believing that every sentence in the world could be made better with the right placement of commas, periods, and exclamation points. Mrs. Smith’s students, however, found her rules rather…well, to be quite a lot.
One day, Mrs. Smith decided to test her students with a peculiar homework assignment. She gave each student a sentence and asked them to correct it, adding the proper punctuation to make the sentence clearer. However, there was one little twist. The sentences were all written without punctuation, and it was up to the students to interpret the meaning.
The first sentence she gave them was: