grammar kvetch

If you need to hide away someplace, you should find a nook and call it your hideaway.

that they stopped paying attention to teachers who taught writing after second grade, and now they think that the generalizations about grammar and punctuation they learned in elementary school in order to grasp the basics of writing are literally the only rules; e.g. "Commas let you take a breath" translates as "I can put a comma anywhere that I personally would want to take a break if I were doing a cold reading of this in a theater audition" and "It's may my friend and I go to recess?" translates to "the word 'me' must not exist anymore, and anytime I talk about myself and another person, it's '[person's name or subject pronoun] and I."

Authors who end a dialogue tag with a period and then make a participle its own sentence right next to it. e.g.

"Blah blah," I said. Gerund blah blah.

How hard is it to put a comma after said and put the modifying part right next to it? Like, where it belongs?

I have no idea either.