National Proofreading Day (8 March), as you may have guessed, “promotes mistake-free writing” – an aspiration as old as the written word. Medieval manuscripts are full of errors and amendments by scribes and copyists, as well as marginal comments such as “New parchment, bad ink; I say nothing more” and “That’s a hard page and a weary work to read

National Punctuation Day – as the sharp-eyed among you will have realised from the two serial/Oxford commas in the mission statement above – is an American invention.