Letter-Writing Challenge

Jackie ♦ July 26, 2010 ♦ Leave a Comment

I’ve told you before that my favorite punctuation mark is the lovely interrobang, and I believe I’ve done some good work in spreading my love throughout the world, proclaiming it to the Internet, select students, and my classmates at the revolutionary grammar workshop I went to last summer.

But now a chance has arisen to proclaim it once more, and perhaps win a free book in the process, as part of the Emdashes “So You Love Punctuation?” challenge. I fell in love with this post even before I reached the end, because it introduced me to names for marks I’d never heard before, such as the manicule, pilcrow, and grawlix. The deadline is August 15th, and the task is to write a letter to that punctuation mark and post it in the blog comments over there. At Bard, I wrote as a punctuation mark and about one, but never to one, and I think the time has come.

The book that inspired the challenge has also a companion site, Letters with Character, which solicits and publishes letters from real people to fictional characters. My first thought was that I could assign this task to my students at the end of each book we read this year, which I still may do, but then my second thought was that this could be a good way to challenge myself along with them, as I have decided to do more. I’ll be keeping a teacher blog on my school website for the first time this year, and I think I’ll have this be a blog post for all of us at the end of each unit, and then require them to submit to this website also. I’ve been trying to find more ways to empower my students to think about audience and publication when they write, and this seems tailor-made.

If you were writing to a punctuation mark, which would you choose? Alternately, which fictional character would you write to? If you try either of these challenges, do please let me know.