Happy National Punctuation Day

September 24 is National Punctuation Day in the U.S. Though this isn’t a statutory (or highly celebrated) holiday in Canada, the fact that there are people in the world who care about and critique punctuation delights me.

In all seriousness, punctuation is a problem in a searcher’s world. Time writer Katy Steinmetz shares some details about how punctuation is evolving and John Davis had some interesting things to say in a 2009 Slaw post. I also confess that I have this Apostrophes page on  grammarbook.com as a favourite.

Today’s Tip: if your search term might be more relevant with punctuation, consider truncating your search with a word stemming character.  And asterisk or an exclamation mark are commonly used for truncation.

One place I do not use a lot of punctuation is on Twitter.  The short format requires abbreviation, incomplete sentence structure and creativity to share a whole idea in a puny text box.  Check out tomorrow’s #CALLFuture Twitter chat starting at 1 PM Eastern. Perhaps there is a reason that law librarians didn’t hold this event on National Punctuation Day!