This really caught my fancy. A “Blog” of “Unnecessary Punctuation”, in this case, quotation marks. Thousands share this pet peeve, it seems.
blogblah!!! (what do they mean, “unnecessary punctuation”? You mean, like three (!) exclamation points? Or four?!?
I did a talkie blog about the parts of speech in which I complain about pronouns being elevated to the same level as nouns. I was challenged to name the 14 punctuation marks. I thought you, as my journalisty wordsmithing father would enjoy my response.
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Dear Naomi:
The real pisser is when (and where) to use which. I’m a little hypocritical about my punctuation since I despise the colon/semicolon mix-up, but I’m constantly in danger of comma splices. Also, I’m not entirely sure braces AND brackets are needed; nothing worth reading requires that much qualification. The list of punctuation parts has not kept up with the times as neither “” nor the asterisk has a spot — that doesn’t even take into account emoticons.
Love [Middle English, from Old English lufu … Latin lubEre, libEre to please],
Rebecca
P.S. You see? I never even used braces!