Thanks to Jen for the link to National Punctuation Day!
From the press release:
Why is punctuation important Jeff Rubin the Punctuation Man and founder of National Punctuation Day explains that without punctuation you would not be able to express your feelings in writing not to mention know when to pause or stop or ask a question or yell at someone and without punctuation you would not be able to separate independent clauses and show an example of how a business lost millions because of an errant comma so dont forget the most important punctuation mark $$$$$$ OK so a dollar signs isnt a punctuation mark but its important dont you agree
I think I am going to change my plans for tomorrow and have some fun with punctuation! I plan on printing (part of) the press release for our do-now and asking the students to add some of the missing punctuation. And I imagine showing some of the incorrectly punctuated signs could start some great conversations.
Filed under: grammar | Tagged: national punctuation day |
The Reading Zone 
Please, please, please spend a good chunk of time on how we do not use an apostrophe to pluralize words. I cannot tell you how many emails I get from adults at work that talk about “report’s” or “timeline’s” in a non-possessive manner.
“It’s” and “its” is a good one, too.
100% agree with Jessica. It’s sad what sneaks into published work (not only news, which I understand gets less editorial attention when they’re trying to release content immediately to the paper’s web site, but even books), much less conversational emails.
I don’t know if you ever read Encyclopedia Brown books when you were young but I recall one where the plot hinged on a message dictated over the phone which was misunderstood by the eventual recipient because it was punctuated incorrectly by the transcriber. It might be a fun activity to take a vaguely complex sentence and see how many different meanings you can get by changing the punctuation.
My personal favorite was a truck that had a “Driver’s wanted” sign on the back. I was sorely tempted to call the number and ask what he was wanted for.