In honor of National Punctuation Day, please take a few moments to assess the proper use of your favorite em-dash, semi colon or period.
I had a hell of an English teacher in middle school who drilled into us the proper use of punctuation, among other grammatical rules. Some of my pet peeves:
1. Punctuation ending a sentence belongs inside the quotes, not outside, unless a parenthetical follows. Example: He said, "I can't believe it's not butter."
2. Use it's when you mean it is and its when you mean the posessive form of it. (okay, that's more grammatical than punctuation, but I digress)
3. Use a semi-colon to link independent clauses, not dependent clauses. Example: I enjoy going running when I travel for work to see new cities; however, this trip I forgot to pack my running sneakers and had to walk in sandals instead.
4. The proper form of the ellipsis is three dots. Two means you made a typo. Four is just plain wrong. Three dots, that's all it takes...
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