National Punctuation Day

Are you a stickler for correct punctuation? Do you appreciate a well-placed apostrophe? Then your day has come – it’s National Punctuation Day!

Now in its seventh official year of celebration, the holiday started when one man, Jeff Rubin, grew frustrated of spotting errors in his newspaper. The event has grown since then, with Rubin’s aim being more educational than correctional these days.

Rubin says he wanted to help educators remind students that punctuation still matters, even in an age of rapid-fire tweets and text messages.

“We are graduating children from high schools now who cannot read and cannot write,” he says. “When these kids get out into the real world, they’re going to be unemployable.” (Source: CNN)

The National Punctuation Day website features activities including “a recipe for meatloaf that can be sculpted to look like exclamation points and semicolons”. I hope it also includes instructions on how to use these correctly.