Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Honor the Day

Today is National Punctuation Day probably not as well known nor as celebrated by the populace but nevertheless an important date for all of us to commemorate for imagine the difficulty of eschewing all forms of punctuation think of people reading aloud without stoping for a period or comma why they'd soon run out of breath perhaps even expire from a lack of oxygen  so let us rejoice in the plethora of punctuation marks at our disposal even those we use less often then the period and the comma and semi-colon or apostrophe let us not forget colons and parentheses or the points of ellipsis or the hyphen or question mark or that overused screaming exclamation point calling attention to himself with nary a concern for decorum yet still there are others the genteel italics or the friend forming hyphen and then let's not turn a cold shoulder toward the lesser lights for if more writers used the inverted question mark we would know that it is merely a rhetorical question  I am drawn to the en-dash and the em-dash but will also use the plebeian dash when necessary remember to honor the founder of the day reporter Jeff Rubin who finally tired of errors and founded the day In 2004 with specific suggestions for celebrating including sleeping late taking a long shower or bath having a speciality coffee or tea and a bagel and then reading the newspaper armed with a red pen to underline or circle all the punctuation errors then take a walk through your town or preferably a large metropolis and seek out  egregious punctuation errors until you tire and go home and write a correctly punctuated epistle such as this one

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home