Arlington — Vincenza Montante, a senior at Washington-Lee High School, in Arlington, was one of two student winners in the 2012 National Punctuation Day Presidential Punctuation Contest.
Vincenza's teacher, David Peters, and his colleague, Sarah Congable, regularly have their students participate in the annual National Punctuation Day writing contest.
Vincenza's winning entry was:
A wise man once said: "No written work is complete without a little suspense — that is, anticipation that makes your ever-stable heart race, your eyes widen, and your mind hungry for more," and I believe he is correct; what would we do without a little suspense in our lives to keep us guessing? The Presidential Punctuation Mark can't be too plain or too expected (although at the same time, not [too] unknown); it needs to be awesome! Obviously the possibilities are endless — semicolons, brackets, hyphens — but only one provides so much drama that the words following the punctuation are startling — the ellipsis.
Hundreds of contest entries were received, most from the United States, but several from other countries. When comes to favorite presidential punctuation marks, as in elections, sometimes there is no clear mandate. Every one of the 13 punctuation marks on the National Punctuation Day website received a presidential vote.
The contest rules were: Write one paragraph with a maximum of three sentences using the following 13 punctuation marks to explain which should be "presidential," and why: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation mark, and semicolon. One may use a punctuation mark more than once, and there is no word limit. Multiple entries are permitted.
Entries with misspelled words, capitalization errors, run-on sentences, misplaced punctuation marks, too many sentences and convoluted ideas, among other reasons, were disqualified.
This was the second consecutive year an Arlington resident won the National Punctuation Day writing contest. Kathleen Summers won in 2011.