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A Word, Please: Don’t forget to send punctuation a card

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National Punctuation Day, which took place on Wednesday, turned 10 this year. The brainchild of Northern California education booster Jeff Rubin, the annual event aims to help kids learn about periods, commas, quotation marks and the rest.

If only it were turning 60. Too many of us made it to adulthood without mastering basics of punctuation. We’ve all seen the result: signs offering “egg’s benedict,” comma splices, run-on sentences and other errors.

So for all the grown-ups for whom Rubin’s campaign arrived too late, here are some punctuation basics that every adult should know.

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There’s no apostrophe in possessive “its.” In sentences like “The dog wagged its tail,” the word “its” takes no apostrophe. Only as a contraction of “it is” or “it has” does “it’s” take an apostrophe: It’s been nice talking to you.

If there’s a comma before a year or a state, you need a comma after it, too. Wrong: July 18, 1979 was a day I’ll always remember. Right: July 18, 1979, was a day I’ll always remember. Wrong: Austin, Texas is a great town. Right: Austin, Texas, is a great town. The obvious exception is when it appears at the end of a sentence, where a period is all you need: I’ll visit Austin, Texas.

Don’t hyphenate -ly adverbs, though you may hyphenate -ly nouns. A happily married couple takes no hyphen. A family-oriented program does.

Contrary to every unedited document on the Internet, a period or comma always comes before a closing quotation mark. That is, if I were using quotation marks to put focus on a word like “awesome,” there’s never a time when that comma would sit to the right of that closing quotation mark. And if the text in quotes were at the end of the sentence, the same would be true for the period.

An exclamation point or question mark can sometimes come after a closing quotation mark, depending on whether it modifies the whole sentence or just the quotation. But in American English, a period or comma always comes before.

Don’t worry about whether to put a hyphen in “email.” Either way it’s correct, though publishers these days are leaning strongly toward no hyphen.

Most people don’t know how to punctuation greetings. Hi, Joe. Hey, Joe. Hello, Joe. Good morning, Joe. These all take a comma before the name. That’s because they’re syntactically different from Dear Joe. The difference? “Dear” is an adjective modifying the name. “Hello” and the like are not. They’re separate from the name.

According to the rules of punctuation, a “direct address,” meaning when you call someone by a name, is set off with commas. So in “Hi, Joe,” the name is set off from the greeting.

Then you can end with a period — “Hi, Joe.” — or with a colon or even a comma. Conversely, “Dear Joe,” which is not a complete sentence, would not end with a period, but with a comma or colon.

Single quotation marks are not a milder form of double quotation marks. They have a specific job: indicating quotations within other quotations. So if you want to talk about the word “dear,” as we did above, but you think quotation marks seem too strong, single quotation marks may seem like a good way to straddle the fence. They’re not. Except within other quotations, single quotation marks are always wrong.

Don’t use a comma to separate items joined by a conjunction unless those items are complete clauses. “Laura doesn’t drink coffee, but she enjoys tea.” “Laura doesn’t drink coffee but enjoys tea.” Both these examples are correct. The latter takes no comma because the stuff after the conjunction isn’t a complete clause.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.

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