Itz a gr8 dy 2B an editr

Before SMS (a.k.a. "text talk") became a language, the statement above would have read: "It's a great day to be an editor." Oh, the language woes that have befallen us since the dawn of text-messaging.

While spelling may be the primary victim of the SMS Age, punctuation has had its share of hard knocks, too.

Editors, language arts teachers, grammarians and generally fastidious writers—take heart. This is your day to shine! Today is National Punctuation Day, an opportunity to boldly and shamelessly embrace the correct usage of commas, colons, semicolons, apostrophes, brackets and quotation marks.

Go ahead, tell your students or colleagues the difference between an em dash, an en dash and a hyphen. Show 'em how to insert an ellipses. Justify the use of the serial comma. And strike the ampersand from that sentence. All in the name of good punctuation!