"Please," "Please," "Please," Let Me Get What I Want

When I first started this blog, I was worried that I wouldn't find enough punctuation errors to sustain it. I still encourage people to write in with their submissions, but I found five punctuation mistakes during a 15-minute walk from South Station to Park Street yesterday. I then found four or five more in and around Fenway Park. The most common error seems to be the misuse of apostrophes. Oh, and no one seems to know how to use en-dashes correctly—especially the Boston Metro.

Unnecessary quotation marks are also everywhere you look, as this blog can attest. Adding quotation marks for no reason is not necessarily wrong in many cases. What is wrong, however, is framing words in quotation marks—instead of italicizing or underlining them—for emphasis.

Punctuation errors abound on the streets of Boston, but for this entry, I'm staying at home. Here's a photo of a sign that my landlords put up in the foyer of our triple-decker.

My landlords really really really want us to turn off the lights I guess. They put the word "please" in quotation marks and underlined it. They also put a comma outside of the quotation marks and omitted a period at the end of the sentence for good measure. Ironically, it's impossible to turn off the lights because they are operated by a motion sensor. And don't get me started on the faux-wood paneling. But that's a whole other story.