Thursday, September 25, 2008

It's National Punctuation Day! Let's Celebrate

My good friend Kathy* reminded me that yesterday was National Punctuation Day.


So, a belated good wishes to you all.
It was an auspicious day; I hope you were able to make the most of it.

You may be thinking, “How on earth would I celebrate a day intended to honor punctuation?”
We could send one another flowers, though I don’t think there is a rose varietal named ‘Blushing Apostrophe.’

I was thinking—yes, I do think on occasion—that we could all vow to use as many punctuation marks as possible.

There is a surprisingly long list of punctuation marks; I (well . . . I got a member of my staff to help me think [OK, OK, sometime I need help thinking] of some of them) came up with the following:
period
comma
exclamation mark
question mark
double quotation marks
single quotation marks
colon
semicolon
apostrophe
hyphen
en dash
em dash
ellipsis/ellipses
slash/solidus
parentheses
brackets
asterisk

You can do it!

My staffer and I decided that the “@” symbol isn’t really punctuation, though in our e-mail–centric world, maybe it is becoming punctuation when used in e-mail addresses.


*a college-era buddy of mine, she is also of the copyeditor persuasion



Compound Punctuation

A colleague to whom I also sent the above message just replied, and added a smilie:


:-) is that a punctuation mark?

she asked.

I told her I think those are compound punctuation.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Let's Get Cracking!


In today's funnies, a comic about revising the dictionary

http://www.comics.com/wash/pickles/archive/pickles-20080908.html


Get busy out there, using up all those old words.

The Girl has made a good stab at it--she had to write and turn in "a piece of polished prose," and I think she misread "polished" for "purple." She got the thesaurus out. 

Now it's your turn to do your part. What old word have you used recently?

Thursday, September 04, 2008

If I Were Only Brave Enough . . . 


We need to tighten the credit style on my magazine; more stuff is appearing on page.

We're toying w/ using the Blueprint style: If the company name and the URL are the same, drop the company name and keep the URL.

But the all-lower-case style makes URLs hard to read.

I'm SO tempted to change a listing like:

Flower girl's dresses, Morgane Le Fay, morganelefay.com

to:

Flower girl's dresses, MorganeLeFay.com.

How stupid would that be?

I know that most pubs put URLs in all lower-case, because the browser doesn't need them. But it also doesn't CARE, right? 

And if the capital letters make comprehension easier, and keep readers from trying to read a broken URL as an actual word, then wouldn't the initial caps be a sensible idea?

Tell me what you think.

(edited to fix a typo--thanks, Tony)