Since we have friends who are visiting in Australia as well as friends who live in Australia, it seems to be a good idea to report that today, in Australia, is National Punctuation Day. Of course, my friends in Australia are unlikely to read this blog today, since it will be after 9 p.m. there before I get this blog written and uploaded to the Internet.

Still, a national punctuation day seems like a good idea, especially to a guy who has been told by several editors that he uses too many commas. Did you notice that I was restrained and only used two in the previous sentence?

I suspect that we are in a phase in the usage of the English language where the rules about punctuation are rapidly changing. The practice of sending text messages and tweets from mobile devices encourages an economy of letters and the ignoring of punctuation all together. The result may be a shift in the way we use written language.

Now I know that the readers of this blog are not the leaders in the move to change the way we use punctuation in written language, so I can probably get away with a few rants about contemporary culture.

So listen up, all you people who send me text messages and who sometimes ask me to write reference letters for you and who leave me notes on my office door: Please use an apostrophe when you’re contracting a word – like the correct usage in this sentence. You are became you’re, not YOUR. If you won’t do it because you know it drives me up the wall, perhaps you’ll consider doing so in honor of the Australians on their National Punctuation Day.

While we’re on the subject of apostrophes, you don’t need to use an apostrophe when you are making a word plural. More than one boy becomes boys. More than one pencil becomes pencils. There is no need to add an apostrophe when making a word plural.

You do use an apostrophe to indicate ownership. Something belonging to the boy is the boy’s possession. That one gets a little tricky when the word ends with an s. Most of the time the apostrophe goes after the s at the end of the word. To write about the pets of a group of boys you would write the boys’ pets. To make things more tricky, you don’t use an apostrophe with pronouns of ownership. His, hers, its, ours and yours don’t use apostrophes when referring to ownership. The use of the apostrophe makes the word into a contraction. He’s means he is and it doesn’t denote that he has a possession.

If you haven’t given up on this blog with its rather obscure topic, you might have noticed my restraint in the use of quotation marks. According to the way I was taught quotation marks are to be reserved for quotes and not used to emphasize a word in a sentence. You see that mistake “all” the time. Please not the improper use of quotation marks in the previous sentence. The same thing goes for figures of speech. They don’t need quotation marks. I know. I’m really bad about that one. I think that I have been worse with that practice since I have been importing plain text into my blog. Italics don’t copy and have to be manually added, so it seemed easier to use quotation marks for emphasis rather than italics. That kind of laziness can contribute to a shift in the rules of grammar, though I doubt if I have enough readers to make an impact on the common usage of language.

I wonder why, in a culture that doesn’t seem to want to use commas or apostrophes, the exclamation mark has become so common. I’ve received text messages with a single word and a dozen exclamation marks. I know that exclamation marks are used to convey enthusiasm and excitement, but the overuse of the punctuation mark seems to delete its impact. Really! If you use it all the time it becomes useless! Do you see what I mean?!

While I’m on a rant, for the record, faces at the end of sentences are not proper punctuation. While it may be friendly or pretty, :) is not proper punctuation. Our culture loses something when people quit trying to show that they are nice through their choices of words. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an emoticon seems to be a poor substitute for a picture. Next time you’re tempted to end a message with an emoticon, try finding some nice words to write.

While I’m on the subject of punctuation, I might as well put in a few words for the humble colon and semicolon. A colon is used to introduce a list of things: words, objects, items, or other things that we might list. It also works to use a colon to introduce an explanation or a definition. Here’s how it works: I get upset when people misuse colons.

The semicolon is a punctuation mark that seems to be tailor made for an oral thinker like myself. When I speak, I use many run on sentences. I string them together like there is no tomorrow. So, when I write, I tend to do the same thing. A semicolon can be used to connect two phrases that could be independent sentences, but which the writer wants to connect because of a similar theme or a relationship between the two sentences. Here is an example: Chuck drives a Ram truck; Jim drives a Chevy.

So here’s the good news: I don’t live in Australia. If I were an Australian and we were officially recognizing National Punctuation Day in my home country, you would probably have to endure more than a mere thousand words on the topic. Since I’m writing from South Dakota, USA, however, I’ll just end with the words of a song that once you get it in your head you’ll be singing it all day long: Comma Comma Down Doobeie Dew Down Down . . . Please note that is not a series of periods, but rather an ellipsis.

Or you can sing it the way Neil Sedaka does: Down Doobie Do Down Down, Comma Comma Down. Or is that Down Dobbie-do Down Down Down, Comma Comma Down? I always get mixed up on the rules about hyphens and dashes.

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