Apparently Sept 24 is a day to celebrate punctuation. How boring, but obviously since I'm posting about it, it has to be interesting to me in some way. In honor of the day, a September blog post at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had a quiz for finding punctuation mistakes.
I commented on the post that the punctuation mistake I see most often is the misuse of a comma to join two independent clauses with the same subject. I find it odd that I encounter it more than others because it's the most basic way to join two sentences. But I guess one has to remember that they need to not use it when the subjects are the same, but need to use it if the 2nd clause has a an understood "you" subject while the first does not.
That mistake doesn't bug me very much. The one mistake that most often bugs me is the misspelled possessive "its". It's my pet peeve because when I notice it, I realize I'm wasting my time dwelling on it.
That makes me wonder: are there any other exceptions in the English language with the use of punctuation?
The post pointed out that the correct way to use an apostrophe for a decade reference is to put it at the beginning, not before the s. For example: '80s is correct while 80's is not. I make that mistake all the time. Now I know better.
