September 24 — (same date every year)
official website: nationalpunctuationday.com
The first thing on the website are icons for punctuation marks. Clicking on an icon gets you to rules for that punctuation mark.
We clicked on the website’s icon for exclamation points. The advice is “AVOID OVERUSE [exclamation point removed].” We try to do better than that — we try to avoid them completely.
Jeff Rubin, Founder:
Excerpt from Washington Post article “Not to Put Too Fine a Point on It, This Guy Cares About Writing’s Jots and Tittles“:
“For some odd reason, I’ve always been interested in punctuation,” Jeff Rubin, father of National Punctuation Day, told me on the phone from his home in Northern California. “It’s just always been that one subset of literacy that has really intrigued me. . . . I still sit around and read the paper, and sometimes I have a red Sharpie in my hand. I play a little game: How many errors can I find today?”
Celebrate with punctuation cookies:
Here’s Jeff at his oven with a frestly baked question mark:
Punctuation Meatloaf
Meatloaf is one of our favoritefoods. We were pleased to find a recipe for Punctuation Meatloaf on the website. Here’s Mrs. Punctuation, Norma Martinez-Rubin, with a freshly-baked Semicolon Meat Loaf
