I spent the plane ride home to California correcting grammar exams. What fun! Seriously. This fall an intrepid group of Harvard expository-writing students followed me for 14 weeks on a romp through the nouns & verbs, simple sentences, and—eek!—relative clauses. We wrapped up by sorting through the sentences of Lewis Carroll. (Alice in Wonderland is great for prepositional phrases—all those ins, outs, downs, and throughs.) We also contemplated the comma, the semicolon, and other sundry pieces of punctuation.

See For Writers and Teachers for a sampling of the kind of work we did in the class. If semi-colons still have you stumped, see A Punctuation Primer and Punctuation: Pet Peeves.

I can’t end the year without a little contest for you, my readers. Wanna win a New Year’s present from me? OK, see if you can punctuate the following group of words so that they make sense:

John where Paul had had had had had had had had had had had the teacher’s approval.

Enter your guesses in the comments area below. The first and/or most correct answer will win a first edition of Wired Style, the revolutionary book-in-a-box that is now an official collector’s item.