It was the best, of punctuation; it was the worst, of punctuation. We reported a few months ago that Chicago achieved an ignominious distinction when a Western Avenue facade was nominated for “Dumbest Sign of the Year” by the organizers of National Punctuation Day, which fell on September 24. Happily, the city has been redeemed. Today NPD announced the outcome of its annual paragraph contest, in which competitors were tasked with writing one three-sentence paragraph that included 13 separate punctuation marks: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation mark, and semicolon.