It's National Punctuation Day, a day for prescriptivists and schoolmarms to lord their shibboleths over everyone else, as opposed to every other day of the year, when everyone is very mellow and forgiving and aware that correct ("correct") use of punctuation is contingent and arbitrary—that it is often a weapon for enforcing social status distinctions rather than a tool for fostering understanding. Here are punctuation marks, ranked in order of their quality and value.
1 . period
2 space
3 ! exclamation point
4 ; semicolon
5 — em dash
6 " " double quotation marks
7 ' apostrophe
8 ? question mark
9 , comma
10 - hyphen
11 : colon
12 – en dash
13 ( open parenthesis
14 ... ellipsis
15 ) close parenthesis
16 ' ' single quotation marks
17 ] close bracket
18 [ open bracket
[Image by Jim Cooke, photo via Shutterstock]
