Bangor - In the world of Facebook, Twitter, and Texting getting information out quickly is what many are focusing on.

But Today is National Punctuation Day and while some may ditch those punctuation marks to save character space, brevity may cost clarity in other situations.

" If you use punctuation without any sense, the conventions, there's simply no clarity in what you're producing," said Dr. Matt Pifer, The Director of the Writing Center at Husson University.

The idea may get across in a 140 character tweet, but if you're writing a cover letter for a job it may be lost and it could cost you an opportunity.

"In terms of writing effectively you want to make sure you have a clear idea that you try to communicate that idea effectively that you organize that idea effectively and the punctuation tends to follow from clear, organized to a clear sense of the idea that you have," said Pifer, who is an Associate Professor of English at Husson.

The errors for many of us come in just a couple of key punctuation areas.

"Common mistakes would be things like putting commas without a conjunction, that would be common, it creates a comma splice or a run on sentence and so they just start putting commas everywhere in that case they're putting a comma where there should be a semicolon," said Pifer. "A lot of people don't use semicolons correctly, they'll use semicolons in place of colons for all kinds of reasons so those tend to be the two most common kinds of errors that we see with punctuation."

And even though National Punctuation Day is relatively light hearted Dr. Pifer thinks putting the spot light on punctuation is deserved. "It's nice that people think about language, think about how effective it can be, also how beautiful it can be, and the fact that punctuation doesn't need to be a painful thing, it can certainly be a way to communicate effectively, it can be part of that process and I think celebrating something like that, being aware of it is a time to think about that you know language is a powerful tool, something we care a lot about."

For more information you can visit The official website of National Punctuation Day.

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