' . ? ! "

Punctuation marks Oh what a big difference they make Their presence or absence can alter the meaning of a sentence or phrase all together Don t you agree

I'm sure you've seen this one:

Punctuate and see how the meaning changes depending on where you put which punctuation.

Woman without her man is nothing.

So, are you a feminist or a male chauvenist sus domestica?

How about this one? The Philippines is the text capital of the world. I betcha knew that already. And I betcha also know that with text messaging comes wrong spellings and absent punctuations, the better to compress messages and save on text pages as it costs one peso per send.

I was reminded of this because of Sir Butch Dalisay's recent post about "Punctuation Marks and Parking Tickets" where he noted that so much of the nuances of linguistic communication is carried by the punctuation marks.

Here's a portion of the press release regarding the fifth national Punctuation Day in America:

“PINOLE, CA — Why is punctuation important Jeff Rubin the Punctuation Man and founder of National Punctuation Day explains that without punctuation you would not be able to express your feelings in writing not to mention know when to pause or stop or ask a question or yell at someone and without punctuation you would not be able to separate independent clauses and show an example of how a business lost millions because of an errant comma so dont forget the most important punctuation mark $$$$$$ OK so a dollar signs isnt a punctuation mark but its important dont you agree”

So! We've learned a lot today, not just me and but also you, if you paid close attention to the above lessons.

Okay, let's try to punctuate this one, to sort of test ourselves if we have indeed learned something new today.

We re going to get an MRI

Which punctuation mark would you use and where would you put it?

We're going to get an MRI.

We're going to get an MRI?

We're going to get an MRI!

We're going to get an MRI?!?

(to be continued)