Friday, September 24, 2010

Punctuate the Day!

By Raelene Gorlinsky

Gasp, I don't know how we almost missed this! Today, September 24, is the seventh annual National Punctuation Day.

They have their own website with lots of fun and informative stuff:
http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/

You can submit an entry to the NPD Punctuation Haiku Contest by September 30. You can see the woman who baked a meatloaf in the shape of a question mark. (Why?) You can see hilarious and heart-wrenching examples people have sent in of punctuation bloopers.

Tired of getting emails with dozens of exclamation points? (Or for editors, submissions where the writer clearly believed the story was more exciting if all periods were replaced by exclamation points.) The advice of mega-selling thriller author Elmore Leonard: "You are allowed only three in every one hundred thousand words of prose."

The most common punctuation error? The apostrophe. So many people don't bother to learn plurals versus possessives--and plural possessives. And let's not even discuss its versus it's and lets versus let's.

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