In honor of National Punctuation Day, commemorated on September 24 (you didn’t forget, did you?), here’s a directory of Web sites documenting, usually with photographs, egregious punctuation errors.
First, by the way, note that the founder of National Punctuation Day, a freelance business-newsletter writer named Jeff Rubin, sponsors a Punctuation Paragraph Contest. The only rule is that you must write one paragraph, maximum of three sentences, using these punctuation marks: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation mark, and semicolon. (You may use a punctuation mark more than once.) Send your entry to the email address at Rubin’s Web site by September 30, 2011.
1. Apostrophe Abuse
Tagline: Links and visuals illustrating an orthographic pet peeve.
2. Apostrophe Catastrophes
Tagline: The Worlds’ Worst. Punctuation;
3. The Apostrophe Protection Society
Tagline: Examples of misuse of the apostrophe as seen by you!
4. The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
Tagline: none
5. English Fail Blog
Tagline: Public Butcherings of the English Language
6. The Gallery Of “Misused” Quotation Marks
Tagline: none
7.GrammarBlog
Tagline: Mocking poor grammar since 2007
8. The Grammar Vandal
Tagline: Taking it to the streets and correcting America, one comma at a time.
9. The Great Typo Hunt
Tagline: none
10. Wordsplosion
Tagline: Showcasing the best of the worst of the wide world of words
Wow!! Is there NOTHING you can’t find on the Internet? This post was great. The first thing I did was go Apostrophe Catastrophes; they invite people to submit photos of apostrophe errors. So the NEXT thing I did was take a photo of a Hooters shirt I have; the shirt is from the Pembroke Pines (FL) restaurant, and on it is printed “Pine’s Rocks” (instead of “Pines Rocks”). Sent that photo over right quick!
Was sorry I never did take a photo of a bench ad (also in Pembroke Pines) advertising a store called “Sofa’s Etc.” I always wanted to know what sort of “et ceteras” a sofa might have…
Looking forward to exploring the other websites when I’m not working and have more time…thanks for sharing!
These are GREAT!!! What fun. I’ll be entertained for hours…days! Thanks for letting us know about them.
Nearly peed myself laughing at some of these haha.
Now I hope nothing I’ve ever done will end up on there.