A Real Holiday for the Comma
National Punctuation Day exists because one former newspaper reporter got tired of misplaced commas. “Let’s eat Grandma” versus “Let’s eat, Grandma.” One of those is dinner. The other is a crime.Share on X
National Punctuation Day is September 24, and I didn’t know it existed until I sat down to write this. Now that I do, I’m glad it’s there. It was founded in 2004 by Jeff Rubin, a former newspaper reporter who got so tired of seeing punctuation butchered in print that he made a holiday out of it. He moved it to September 24 to line up with the school year and to honor the jersey number of his baseball hero, Willie Mays.
The point of the day is simple and correct. Punctuation isn’t decoration and it’s not optional. It carries meaning. The classic example says it all. “Let’s eat Grandma” and “Let’s eat, Grandma” are two very different sentences, and the only difference is one comma. One is dinner with Grandma. The other is cannibalism. That little mark is doing real work, and so are all the others. Punctuation is how written language tells you where to pause, what connects to what, and who exactly is getting eaten.
Watch: Punctuation Explained (by Punctuation!) | Scratch Garden, Scratch Garden
My Real Pet Peeve: AI Is Flattening Everyone’s Writing
AI is funneling everyone toward one standard of writing, and that standard is mediocre. A lot of it was trained on Reddit and Wikipedia. The result reads exactly like that.Share on X
Something bigger than commas worries me about writing right now: artificial intelligence is funneling everybody toward a single standard of writing, and that standard is mediocre at best.
I keep seeing people accept AI-written text as if it’s good writing, and most of it simply isn’t. It ranges from mediocre to bad. AI has certain patterns it falls into, recognizable tics and rhythms, and those patterns aren’t good writing.
That makes sense when you remember where a lot of AI learned to write. Much of the training came from places like Reddit and Wikipedia. Now, a Reddit post can be brilliant, funny, sharp, even moving.
But nobody is claiming Reddit is punctuation perfect or a model of polished prose. Train a machine on oceans of average writing and it produces average writing, confidently, forever.
The strangest casualty of all this is the em dash.
People now treat the em dash as a sign that AI wrote something, so they’ve started avoiding it like it is contraband. This is silly. The em dash is a completely valid piece of grammar that great writers have used for centuries, and you should use it whenever it serves the sentence. Banning a legitimate mark because a chatbot likes it’s letting the machine dictate your style.
I happen to avoid em dashes in my own published work, but that’s a deliberate house-style choice I made, and it says nothing about whether the mark is wrong. There’s a real difference between choosing not to use something and being scared to use it because of what people might assume. Make your punctuation choices on purpose.
The Habit That Beats the Machine
Don’t guess at a comma. Look it up. Every time you wonder how punctuation works, open the Chicago Manual of Style and find out. Do that enough and you’ll never need to wonder again.Share on X
So how do you write better than the average machine? You learn how your language works. That’s the whole secret, and it’s not complicated.
Understand how punctuation works. Understand how your language is built. And when you’re not sure about something, don’t guess. This is the habit that changes everything. Most people, when they hit a comma they’re unsure about, just think to themselves, “I’ll use a comma this way,” and move on, inventing a rule on the spot. Don’t do that. Instead, go look it up. Open the Chicago Manual of Style, or whatever style guide you’re writing against, and find the actual rule for that comma. Then use it correctly.
The Chicago Manual of Style is the standard for most book and general publishing in the United States, and you don’t have to memorize it. (See also the laminated Chicago quick guide) At least skim the important sections so you know what’s in there, then look things up as you need them.
Every time you look something up instead of guessing, you learn it a little more permanently. Do that enough times and the rules stop being mysteries.
You start to know your craft at the level of the comma, and that’s more than most writers and more than any chatbot trained on Reddit will ever understand.
Look the rule up every time and the rules stop being mysteries.
Two Books That Make Punctuation Painless
If a full style manual sounds dry, start with two books I keep in my own library, both of which make this stuff enjoyable.
The first is Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. The title comes from a joke about a panda and a badly punctuated wildlife manual, and the whole book is like that, funny and sharp while it teaches you real rules. It’s a bestseller for good reason. It’s not hard, and it’ll make you care about punctuation in spite of yourself.
The second is Whose Grammar Book Is This Anyway? by Edward Good.
It’s another approachable, friendly guide to the rules of English, the kind of book that explains grammar and punctuation without making you feel like you’re back in a classroom you hated. Both of these are in my library, and both are worth yours. Read them, keep a style guide nearby, and look things up. That’s how you punctuate like a professional instead of like a prediction engine.
| Reference | Author | Why the page recommends it |
|---|---|---|
| Chicago Manual of Style | Style guide | The standard for most US book and general publishing; skim it, then look things up |
| Laminated Chicago quick guide | Style guide | A quick reference to the Chicago rules |
| Eats, Shoots & Leaves | Lynne Truss | Funny and sharp while it teaches real rules |
| Whose Grammar Book Is This Anyway? | Edward Good | An approachable, friendly guide to the rules of English |
What This Means for Writers
The deeper lesson of Punctuation Day, in the age of AI, is about ownership of your craft.
Punctuation is one of the clearest places where a real writer separates from a machine and from a lazy one. Anyone can let autocorrect or an AI tool make the calls. A writer knows why the comma goes there, chooses the em dash on purpose or leaves it out on purpose, and controls the rhythm of a sentence deliberately. That control is craft.
It’s the difference between writing that sounds like a person who knows what they’re doing and writing that sounds like everything else being churned out right now.
So on September 24, do something small and powerful. Find one punctuation rule you’ve always just guessed at, and look it up for real. (See also Punctuation Plain and Simple) Learn it. Then write a sentence using it correctly, on purpose, like someone who owns their craft. That’s worth more than a thousand words of confident, mediocre, machine-smoothed prose.