I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.
—Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
September 24 is National Punctuation Day, started in 2004 by Jeff Rubin.
We, of course, work with punctuation all day, every day, and we’ve laughed quite hard over countless linguistic mishaps resulting from the incorrect use or even the omission of necessary of punctuation. (Please feel free to check out past Quill & Ink articles discussing the intricacies of punctuation, including this one from 2016, this one from 2015, and this one from 2014.) Because we of course we would never underscore any examples of this from our own authors, consider taking a moment to reflect on these amusing examples already published for public consumption:
While admittedly sources vary somewhat on the official number of punctuation marks in the English language, the following beautifully presented graphic is pretty representative of what we see in a typical day.
Go forth and punctuate!