NORWICH — An Upper Valley woman is one of four winners in the 2013 National Punctuation Day Presidential Punctuation Contest. The winners were announced Friday.

Former Dartmouth Medical School Publications Director Dana Cook Grossman wrote three sentences explaining which punctuation mark is “presidential” while using 13 punctuation marks: apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation mark, and semicolon.

Grossman’s winning entry was: I know, with out-and-out certainty, which mark should be the official punctuation mark of the President of the United States; it has to be the period. I say that for two reasons: 1) the fact that “full stop” is a (chiefly British [according to Webster’s]) synonym for “period” and 2) the fact that — as per the sign that sat on Harry Truman’s desk in the Oval Office — “The ... stops here!” Could any other argument top that one?

Grossman is a freelance writer, editor and communications consultant. She retired from Dartmouth in 2011.