National Punctuation Day!

Happy National Punctuation Day!

Now, once you've finished celebrating with the appropriate use of commas and exclamation points, I'll turn your attention to spelling and grammar on the web.

Somehow, in the era of tweets and pins and likes, we've lost our way on the road to good writing. And I'm not talking about lofty, eloquent phrasing or Jeopardy-worthy vocabulary. I mean the simple use of proper grammar, good spelling, and (of course!) appropriate punctuation.

1) When did it become acceptable to CAPITALIZE EVERYTHING? So you want to emphasize a feature, or point out an important detail. Okay, great. But when everything is emphasized, nothing is. Also, it's just, plain incorrect.

• Use capitalization only where they're meant to be used - proper nouns and the start of sentences.
• Use bold or italics to make something stand out in your text. 

Every Word Of Your Sentence, or EVERY LETTER IN YOUR WORDS makes your content hard to read, not to mention it comes across as yelling. Don't yell at your customers. Nobody likes a yeller.

2) Who decided that commas and semicolons were interchangeable? They're not. It seems like suddenly semicolons are the new commas when it comes to writing out lists of products or brands or services. It's strange and, again, just incorrect.

• Commas represent the natural pause(s) in your sentence, or breaks between list items
• Semicolons separate distinct, but related sentences, or can technically be used between items that also have commas (i.e. between addresses, like Boston, MA; New York, NY; etc)

When commas and semicolons are used incorrectly, your content looks and reads poorly, which in turn reflects poorly on you. Your business deserves to be taken seriously!

3) Spelling. Oh my goodness, spelling. In these post-AOL dial-up days, we've come so very far from "c u nxt wk" and "omg ttyl." Or have we?

In an era of digital content and spellcheck, there's no excuse for bad spelling. And yet so very many people, and businesses, still publish poorly written, terribly spelled content to their websites!

• Read your own content. Read it early, read it often. Have a friend read it to catch what you miss.
• Use spell check! Technology is amazing; take advantage of its helpful tools. That red squiggly line is there to help.

A spur-of-the-moment Twitter post with an accidental typo can be forgiven, but when it's your online presence, your first impression to potential customers - your website - there's no room for spelling mistakes.

Just because words have gone digital doesn't mean that using them, and all their accessories, is no longer important. In fact, I'd argue that it's more important than ever! With unlimited resources available to you to check, double-check, and question the writing you publish to the web, there's no excuse and no good reason to put bad spelling and grammar on your website, social media, or any other medium of online presence.

This National Punctuation Day, help a poor, struggling writer in need. Correct their dashes, dots, and symbols today!