Today, I have a special show for you because it's September 24th National Punctuation Day,

a holiday created by an educator named Jeff Rubin. To celebrate the day, I had a punctuation

contest, and today's show highlights two of the winners. Other winners have appeared

in the free grammar girl email newsletter this week. The first winning entry is titled

Going Cold Turkey on National Punctuation Day by Eileen Burmeister. I know it's wrong to use

it in such a way, and I know that it's become a crutch, but I must admit that I've been having

an illegitimate love affair with the ellipses for years now. Surely I thought I could find a

support group among the many writers who have been similarly led down this particularly primrose

path of pauses. But alas, dot, dot, dot, nonexisted. Not to be dissuaded, I set out and started

my own support group called ellipses, dot, dot, dot, anonymous. I invited everyone to my house

at 2000 West Maple, dot, dot, dot, a place I confess I bought for the address alone, dot, dot,

dot, and I served M&Ms in batches of three. However, the people who showed up tended to trail off

midway through their stories, or stopped abruptly before staring off into space, which seemed

appropriate, but really stymied the healing process. It was, dot, dot, dot, daunting.

I found myself wandering the streets that night, talking to myself, binging on one story after

another without end, drinking deep from the nectar of incomplete thoughts until, dot, dot, dot,

I hit rock bottom. It had gotten to the point where I couldn't pause for a breath in my prose

without automatically hitting, dot, dot, dot. I was ravenous, dot, dot, dot, a wild animal on the

prowl for a pregnant pause, a thoughtful moment, or a half-baked idea so I could swoop in and get my fix.

I was putting ellipses where a common wood suffice, dot, dot, dot, ellipses where an M-dash would

do the trick, dot, dot, dot, ellipses when a yada yada yada when could fade the same idea. It was

all too much and I collapsed under the pressure. I woke up the next morning in the gutter outside

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