2017 National Grammar Day Haiku Contest
Mignon Fogarty
Fire up your fingers! It’s time for the National Grammar Day haiku contest. It’s becoming something of an annual event—but we don’t like to commit, so we aren’t giving it a number.
In collaboration with the American Copy Editors Society, the contest takes place on Twitter, where you submit your haiku-like poem by tweeting it with the hashtag #GrammarDay.
The haiku must be about grammar, usage, or language in some way. Entries must be posted by 11:59 PM PST Thursday, March 2. Judges will deliberate on March 3, and the winners will be announced on National Grammar Day, March 4.
Prizes
We know you’re just in it for the glory, but we’ve gathered some prizes anyway. The winner will receive:
- One copy of Grammar Girl Presents the Ultimate Writing Guide for Students by Mignon Fogarty
- One copy of Things That Make Us (Sic) by Martha Brockenbrough
- A One-Year Membership to ACES (the American Copy Editors Society) and a certificate to an ACES one-day training event.
- A “Be Explicit” tote bag courtesy of Mark Allen (aka @EditorMark)
If you’re an ACES board member or employee, a Macmillan employee, or a close relative of the organizer, one of the judges, or Grammar Girl, you can enter, but forces will conspire against your actually winning a prize of any value.
Judges
- Emily Brewster (@eabrewster) is an associate editor and lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, Inc. As a general definer, she’s covered all kinds of vocabulary, from grammar to finance to slang. Her videos for Merriam-Webster’s website tackle such vexing issues as lie vs. lay and its vs. it’
s. She’s also worked as a poetry editor. - Laura M. Browning (@ellembee) is co-editor-in-chief of The A.V. Club and a board member of the American Copy Editors Society. She once won a poetry award in high school.
- Amorak Huey (@amorak), a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in poetry, is author of the poetry collection Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and the chapbooks The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl, 2014) and A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly, 2016). He teaches writing at Grand Valley State University, before which he spent 14 years as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Florida, Kentucky, and Michigan.
- Tom Freeman (@SnoozeInBrief) is an editor at the Wellcome Trust, a foundation that supports health-related research and publishes longform science stories at mosaicscience.com. He is the winner of the 2016 ACES National Grammar Day Tweeted Haiku Contest.
- Paula Froke (@PaulaFroke) is the AP’s special liaison editor with MSN/Microsoft and lead editor of the AP Stylebook. Her 30-plus years with the AP has included jobs as news editor in Minnesota and Michigan, deputy national editor at headquarters and assistant managing editor/nights on the AP Nerve Center in New York. She worked on the editing desk at four Olympics.
More Information
To get more of a sense of the contest and to find out why these are only fake haiku, please visit the page with the 2016 haiku contest winners.
About the Author
Mignon Fogarty is the founder of Quick and Dirty Tips and the author of seven books on language, including the New York Times bestseller “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.” She is an inductee in the Podcasting Hall of Fame, and the show is a five-time winner of Best Education Podcast in the Podcast Awards. She has appeared as a guest expert on the Oprah Winfrey Show and the Today Show. Her popular LinkedIn Learning courses help people write better to communicate better.