Comments on: National Punctuation Day? Who knew?

By: NathanA

NathanA — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:03:50 +0000

Wow! That punctuation-baking contest seems tasty, does it? Celebrating punctuation day is a good way to bring awareness to people of the correct grammars and use of punctuation. Take time to celebrate National Punctuation Day. It seems that National Punctuation Day would be a holiday that will make the respective buildings containing the home offices of Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter on fire, because hardly anybody on those respective websites seems to know what punctuation, or grammar is. It's a fake holiday, like so many other holidays are, but this one at least highlights something concrete, but also a growing problem in that a growing number of adults are functionally illiterate, and people are learning the majority of their written communication skills with text messaging. Maybe a personal loan to celebrate National Punctuation Day would be worth it.

By: Marvin

Marvin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 01:31:45 +0000

I understand what you are saying, Gary. I was taught the same way. In the case of parentheses or quotes the punctuation goes inside, but is it “judgement” or is it “judgment?” Language changes. You must go with the flow. The problem with the old style is that it is confusing. In each case you want to highlight something exactly. I don’t want to highlight and compare “judgement” and “judgment.” It is “judgement” and “judgment” I want to compare. In order to do so exactly, I must fudge the system to avoid the issue. With URLs the issue is even more important, for if I highlight the “URL.” I will get a 504 error: Page not found. In these cases the language “rules” are unreasonable; they do not work well in a real-life “copy and paste” world. Did I make it through okay?

By: Colleen Smidt

Colleen Smidt — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 21:02:24 +0000

This is too fun. I will be forwarding this to a couple of my co-workers. Due to the nature the business in which I am employed, a significant amount of quality control, proofreading and format consistency takes place within my department. There are days when the conversation amongst the writers, course developers and myself regarding semicolon usage, commas and hyphen placement goes on entirely too long and is way too involved.

Last year, when inner office punctuation frustration reached an all time high, I purchased them their own copy of a book that is used quite frequently in the local elementary schools. It is called “Punctuation Takes a Vacation”. Now we can all have a great laugh over it when the debate over punctuation rules get a little too heated around here.

By: GARY

GARY — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:51:54 +0000

This excerpt from the article is punctuated incorrectly:

National Punctuation Day website (www.NationalPunctuationDay.com).

It is properly rendered:

National Punctuation Day website (www.NationalPunctuationDay.com.)

Such writing is, alas, ubiquitous.