Are You Ready for National Punctuation Day?

We spend most of our days working with words, and though we surely make mistakes, bad punctuation makes our blood boil. The same can be said for former newspaper reporter Jeff Rubin, who founded National Punctuation Day in 2004 as a way to encourage worldwide literacy and "remind America that a semicolon is not a surgical procedure."

The big event is Sept. 24, but Rubin's organization is holding a punctuation contest through Sept. 30, with the winners receiving a box of "punctuation goodies." Here are the rules, according to its website:

"Write one paragraph, maximum of three sentences, using these 13 punctuation marks: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation mark, and semicolon. You may use a punctuation mark more than once. Entries will be accepted at Jeff@NationalPunctuationDay.com through Sept. 30."

Let us know if you enter and how you fare!