National Punctuation Day — September 24 — [same day every year]
August 12, 2011
Hello punctuation fans,
The fall 2011 issue of The Exclamation Point [exclamation point removed] – the newsletter of National Punctuation Day and Punctuation Playtime – is attached. Previous issues are available here: http://www.punctuationplaytime.com/exclamationpoint/index.html
The Exclamation Point [another exclamation point removed] features information about the Eighth Annual National Punctuation Day on September 24, 2011, our Punctuation Paragraph Contest, the latest literacy news from around the world, and our Punctuation Playtime assemblies for students in grades K-6.
There’s more information about National Punctuation Day and the Punctuation Paragraph Contest here: http://www.NationalPunctuationDay.com.
Yours in proper punctuation,
Jeff Rubin
Founder National Punctuation Day
Pinole, California
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The first thing you see on the website for this important event are icons for punctuation marks. Clicking on an icon gets you to rules for the punctuation mark. We like clever — and useful and helpful — things like this.
We clicked on the website’s icon for exclamation points. The advice is “AVOID OVERUSE [exclamation point removed].” We do better than that on our website — we avoid them completely.
Founder and Reason for Founding
From The Washington Post’s 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?”
The answer: too many.
Baking for National Punctuation Day
One way to celebrate National Punctuation Day is baking punctuation cookies:
Jeff baking a question mark cookie
Punctuation Meatloaf
As a favorite food of Dull Men is meatloaf, we were so pleased when we found the recipe for Punctuation Meatloaf on the website, click here. We got excited. (Almost too excited; Dull Men try to avoid excitement.)
Norma Martinez-Rubin, “Mrs. Punctuation,”
proudly shows off her Semicolon Meat Loaf
