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National Punctuation Day 2009: How to Celebrate
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by Alyzee | September 24, 2009 at 09:34 am
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Today is the 6th Annual National Punctuation Day in the US. National Punctuation Day was created by former copy editor Jeff Rubin who pushed for a day to spread awareness about correct punctuation. Rubin succeeded when the 24 of September was recognized as National Punctuation Day in Chase's Calendar of Events.
National Punctuation Day is to celebrate:
the lowly comma, correctly used quotes, other proper uses of periods, semicolons and the ever-mysterious ellipsis
This year, National Punctuation Day is being celebrated with a baking contest, where cookies, cakes and other baked goods should be baked in the shape of punctuation marks and a sample should be mailed to National Punctuation Day headquarters in California. The deadline for entries is September 30. Click here for more contest details.
There are also lyrics to a rap song about punctuation on Jeff Rubin's website:
"I am a COLON, I am two dots / I’m the introducer, I express your thoughts."
The site also sells punctuation products such as T-shirts and mugs with pictures and captions such as: 'A semicolon is not a surgical procedure' and 'is there a hyphen in anal-retentive?'.
Aside from the fun and games, Rubin takes the problem of incorrect punctuation very seriously, and sees incorrect punctuation as a decline in literacy:
There's an epidemic of poor punctuation in the United States, much like the Swine flu. It¹s too bad there's no vaccine to prevent it.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 12:37 on September 24th, 2009
Lynn Truss who wrote Eats Shoots and Leaves a few years ago about punctuation must be happy that her attempt to reclaim the values of punctuation has its own day, but then so do cheeseburgers and cheese cake.
This impassioned manifesto on punctuation made the best-seller lists in Britain and has followed suit here. Journalist Truss gives full rein to her "inner stickler" in lambasting common grammatical mistakes. Asserting that punctuation "directs you how to read in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play," Truss argues wittily and with gusto for the merits of preserving the apostrophe, using commas correctly, and resurrecting the proper use of the lowly semicolon. Filled with dread at the sight of ubiquitous mistakes in store signs and headlines, Truss eloquently speaks to the value of punctuation in preserving the nuances of language. Liberally sprinkling the pages with Briticisms ("Lawks-a-mussy") and moving from outright indignation to sarcasm to bone-dry humor, Truss turns the finer points of punctuation into spirited reading. Joanne Wilkinson Copyright © American Library Association.
I learned punctuation from an English teacher in college, and the Harbrace Handbook of punctuation is forever imprinted on my brain. Our essays were replete with red marks indicationg the rule we did not use correctly, and we had to rewrite with the corrections. The power of the punctuation mark to alter and change meanings was drilled into our minds together with many other rules for good English and proper writing skills.