National Punctuation Day haiku contest

[Curt]

Celebrate the seventh annual National Punctuation Day®
September 24, 2010

Congratulations, America! I would like for my country to also have such a day!
What's that: You didn't know about National Punctuation Day? Now you do!

http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/

... our first National Punctuation Day® Haiku Contest, with the winners receiving a plethora of punctuation goodies.

Send your best 5-7-5 (syllables, that is) poetry to me at [email protected], and let the literary games begin! Haikus must be received by September 30 to be considered for prizes.

To get you started, here are a few haikus written by my friend Craig Harrison, one of the best sales and customer-service trainers—and prolific writers—I know.





Which colon to use?
Colon or semi-colon?
I’ll use a comma.


Exclamation points.
Some people just love to shout
In print and in speech.


Serial comma.
What is your philosophy?
To use or not to?





Raised by two parens
I’ve been bracketed since youth.
I’m an inside job.


Dot dot ellipses
The yada yada of print.
So on and so forth.


Punctuate or die.
What is a writer to do?
Good writers will know.


Colon-oscopy:
When my editor removes
My inflamed colon.


Exclamation points
And question marks together?
Only in comics.


The apostrophe:
Found on both sides of letters.
The right side and wrong.


Are you Brit or Yank?
Show me your quotation marks
And I’ll tell you which.


i’m ee cummings
i break punctuation rules.
that’s what poets do.


Em dash or en dash.
On typewriters it’s easy,
On keyboards, less so.


While I like to write,
Punctuation is a drag.
That’s for editors.


How to punctuate?
Try Punctuation Playtime
For kids AND adults!


90^o:



PUNCTUATION PROGRAM IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS®

http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/

[Curt]

Also Savage Chickens are celebrating National Punctuation Day:

[tomos]

enjoying the thread

Here's is an old comic from girls with slingshots (dont have the direct link to this one)

NSFW (but only a bit risque really)

[Curt]

-nice one, Tom    either his punctuation or he's spelling was wrong.....

[Renegade]

Punctuation is a very weak point for a lot of people, and it is certainly nice to see some attention being paid to it.

Any punctuation pet peeves? Hehe. I'll start...

Braces. They are not brackets. They are called braces. { and }. They are also not called curly brackets. They have a name. How would you like it if someone called you the wrong name all the time?

Next: Ellipses... Three dots... Curt. (Sorry - couldn't resist. But nice play on "he's" there!)

Which brings me to the m-dash... It has recently gained a lot of popularity but is almost always misused. Sigh... It is not a comma. It used similarly to parentheses.

I do really like the drunken punctuation from the chicken cartoon. I wish that was on my keyboard!

[mouser]

It's "em-dash" not "m-dash":

The term em dash derives from its defined width of one em, which is the length, expressed in points, by which font sizes are typically specified. Thus in 9-point type, an em is 9 points wide, while the em of 24-point type is 24 points wide, and so on. (By comparison, the en dash, with its 1-en width, is ½ em wide in most fonts.[11])

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

[Renegade]

It's "em-dash" not "m-dash":

The term em dash derives from its defined width of one em, which is the length, expressed in points, by which font sizes are typically specified. Thus in 9-point type, an em is 9 points wide, while the em of 24-point type is 24 points wide, and so on. (By comparison, the en dash, with its 1-en width, is ½ em wide in most fonts.[11])

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

-mouser (September 24, 2010, 05:06 PM)

  Good catch!

[Eóin]

From that same Wikipedia article

The em dash (—), or m dash, m-rule, etc.