Happy National Punctuation Day!

In honor of today's holiday, I shall now share with you four amusing punctuation-related items (yes, there is too such a thing as an amusing punctuation-related item!). Item #1 is the clipping above about punctuating the same sentence differently to create two entirely different meanings.

Item #2: The following tales from some of my colleagues who work with student writers at universities across the country:

• "Years ago, probably around 1994, I taught a writing-about-literature course at a New York community college. In the writing sample of one student, I discovered something that I had never seen before: a punctuation blizzard. There were commas, semicolons, exclamation points, colons all over the place, interrupting sentences in the most unlikely places, following single words--in short, you could not see the writing for the profusion of punctuation marks. Astonished, I asked the student why he was placing all these punctuation marks into his sentences without any rhyme or reason. His answer was equally astonishing: without them, he said, the writing looked so naked. I will never forget this episode. A student actually thought that punctuation served to ornament writing, a dress-up of sorts. I need not tell you how long it took me to disabuse him of that notion and to get him to write sentences without using commas and semicolons as seasoning."


• "Many years ago when I worked as a peer tutor at Mobile College, I had a student come in to work with me on a regular basis. One day when he was drafting in the center as we brainstormed ideas, I noticed that he was marking things off in the left-hand margin. When I looked more closely, I saw rows of commas, periods, and semi-colons, with a few colons thrown in. He was marking these off as he used them in his paper. When I asked him about it, he said that he had worked up a formula for how many of each should be used in a good paper, so he was making sure he met the formula."


• "We had a student in the Writing Center whose draft was full of sentence fragments. The tutor asked him to explain why he was ending sentences in mid-thought, and he explained that he'd looked at the sample essays in his text and calculated the average sentence length to be about 20 words. So he just stuck in a period after every 20th word."


• "A student athlete I tutored at Sam Houston State University while I was in grad school (this was before computers) put a period at the end of every line, whether or not the sentence was complete. The right-hand margin of the paper was a straight line of periods! He said a teacher had taught him to do it that way."


• "I have something of a story, too, but it isn't mine. This was told to me by a colleague at another school. She was teaching research and documentation to a freshman composition class. She reviewed the first drafts of their research papers and then returned them for revision. On one girl's paper, she had written, 'Too many quotes.' When the student turned the final draft in, she had removed all of the quotation marks!"


• "I once tutored a student whose punctuation was wildly erratic. Sometimes, it would be right. More often, it would make no sense. I could not discern a pattern, no matter how hard I tried. Finally I asked her how she determined where to put punctuation. Well, it turned out that she was a graphic design major. That punctuation carried any meaning was news to her--she had believed that punctuation marks were decorative elements, and she had been applying principles of design to her choices of where to put them. Her choices made sense to her--they were just completely out of context."


• "And then there's the aesthete's approach to punctuation. Last semester I encountered a writer whose comma placement seemed particularly random. 'How do you determine where a comma should go?' I asked. 'Well, I noticed that the writers I like to read put commas where they look really good. So I put in commas where I think they look good.'"

Item #3: Surely you'll recall having visited this site and having determined your own punctuation personality profile. Right? Well, here's another option (from a student at another university who noticed the absence of the semi-colon from the list):

Semi-colon ( ; ) – You are pretentious and over-informed, or at least seem that way. Others view you as highly literate and thoughtful, but be careful of your mistakes. One false move could expose your charade to other Semi-colons if you're just pretending.

Item #4: You'll enjoy viewing this on-line video called "Passive-Aggressive Communications Solutions: Punctuation Substitution System."