As both faithful readers know, I celebrate a lot of holidays. This year I intended to celebrate a holiday that I usually don’t — National Punctuation Day. As I said, this isn’t a day usually celebrated by me — not because I don’t think its important, but I have come to celebrate a lot of holidays and I have to leave some days free to just not celebrate.
But I thought I’d talk a bit about it this year because like all subjects, there are some things about punctuation that annoy me — lately, the most annoying thing is the lack of punctuation in text messages and even e-mails….
I often say that Claire talks without any punctuation — she just goes from one subject to another without inserting a period, or even a comma.
But before this becomes all about me and my thoughts on punctuation, we should all remember that this holiday is to celebrate the importance of proper punctuation. However, punctuation, like everything else it seems, is changing — what used to be proper isn’t anymore. It used to be that when punctuation was discussed, it would be about the proper use of commas, periods, hyphens, question marks, exclamation marks, and things like that. Today, something called emoji(s) are being touted as punctuation. Emoji are basically little pictures that supposedly express emotions, like a smiley face (remember when everyone thought it was cute to end a sentence with :)? In my mind that was bad enough, but now you can use an actual smiley face, or frownie face, or whatever.
The younger generation, that knows how to text things, but doesn’t know how to write anything, are apparently of the opinion that punctuation isn’t even needed. Young people, or “text-ers” of any age, don’t believe there’s any confusion by omitting the punctuation. But one thing I’ve noticed — text-ers seem to use a lot of exclamation marks — all over the place, not where people who write would think they’re appropriate.
Hyphens are another punctuation mark that is disappearing — a lot of words we use today used to be hyphenated, like today used to be written to-day. Same for lots of words. You may have noticed that I use a lot of dashes (not hyphens) in my writing. You may or may not be wondering why — probably not, but I’ll tell you anyhow…. When I took Freshman English, we had to write a theme every day. If you made a comma error by placing a comma where one didn’t belong, it earned an automatic “F.” The professor didn’t read any further, it was just and F. So — I figured out that if I wasn’t sure about the use of a comma, I used a dash. The professor might knock off a point or so for it, but no automatic fail. From that time forward, I’ve been fond of the dash and I use and over-use them all the time.
But back to the day itself — it was on September 24th. Since I intended to celebrate it, I wondered about how to celebrate it, since I’d never celebrated it before. I thought since it’s a holiday, I’d sleep late, maybe go out for breakfast, check the Internet and count all the punctuation errors I find in the first couple of pages, and maybe make an entry in the blog that is completely punctuation error free. But since I missed it this year, I’ll have more time to plan for it next year.
Before I leave the subject of punctuation and start planning for next year’s celebration, what is the correct name for (!) — is it Exclamation Mark or Exclamation Point? Just wondering…
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