Celebrate Punctuation
by Danielle Wood
Do you know the difference between a hyphen and a dash? The right time to use a colon? Do your sentences overflow with apostrophes, and your quotes have periods or commas behind them, rather than tucked inside? Well, you may not have noticed, but yesterday there was a holiday just for you: The 5th Annual National Punctuation Day.
Launched by former newspaper man Jeff Rubin, the day is “a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotes, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipses” and it’s celebrated at schools and businesses across the country.
Why, exactly? Because in this age of instant messaging and all-lowercase emails, we’ve gotten lazy. We drop periods from sentences like yesterday’s trash. We avoid proper salutations and write long run-on posts, rather than decent paragraphs. And our kids? Those guys don’t have a prayer. The only semicolon they’re likely to ever see is the eyeballs of the email smiley sign :)
Even if you missed taking part in the grand celebration, you can still end your week with a little punctuation. Make the holiday an excuse to talk to your kids about the beauty of a perfectly placed comma. Question them about the difference between a question mark and a period. If you need a refresher, take a look at Rubin’s site.
And if your kids seem none to excited to take part, bring out the big guns. Forget ice cream or cake, I’m talking about the official meal of National Punctuation Day: a meatloaf shaped like a question mark. If that’s not a way to get the conversation rolling, I don’t know what is!
Danielle Wood is the Director of Editorial for Education.com. You can reach her at editorial@education.com
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