English Grammar Punctuation

Notes from Eats, Shoots& Leaves (Lynne Truss)

 

Traditionally punctuation made it easier to read text aloud or to signal a pause. This was especially useful for actors on stage. In modern usage, punctuation serves additional functions such as indicate emphasis, for syntactic reasons or to avoid ambiguity.

Every publication house follows different style guides for punctuation. Additionally, the British usage differ from the American one (e.g. usage of punctuation within quotation marks).

Apostrophe: possessive marker (e.g. Jack's, boy's, boys'), to indicate omission (e.g. summer of '69), indicate time or quantity (e.g. two month's notice), plurals of letters and words (e.g. f's, do's and don't's); no need to use for plurals or abbreviations (e.g. MPs and MLAs) or dates (e.g. 1980s)

Comma: for lists (e.g. Tom, Dick and Harry), for joining complete sentences, bracketing commas (instead of em-dash or parenthesis);

Semicolon and Colon: to indicate pause and emphasis

Exclamation mark, italics, quotation marks (single and double), brackets (round, square, curly, angle)

How to choose between single and double quotation mark?
How to choose among round bracket, em-dash and comma?

Hyphen: to combine words (e.g. pre-train), when a noun phrase acts as an adjective (e.g. state-of-the-art model), to split unfinished words at the end of a line, to avoid ambiguity (e.g. re-formed vs. reformed)

 

Punctuation Marks

• Full stop 
  

  Alice met Bob.
• Comma
  

  Alice gave Bob a pen, paper, and a pencil. 

  Alice, a student, met Bob.
• Semicolon
  

  Alice gave Bob a paper; Bob took it reluctantly.
• Colon
  

  Alice gave Bob a few items: a pen, a paper, and a pencil.
• Question mark
  

  Did Alice meet Bob?
• Exclamation mark
  

  Hurray, we won! Yipee!
• Quotes
  

  ``Come,’' Alice told Bob.
• Apostrophe denotes contraction and possession.
  

  it’s, Alice's, p’s, 7’s, 1990s, MPs
• Hyphen
  

  Does your organization have a by-law?
• Dash denotes comment
  

  Alice will not come - I hope so.
• Parentheses denotes supplementary information.
  

  Alice (a student) met Bob.

English Grammar Punctuation

 

Character	Code Point	Name	Purpose
‐	u2010	Hyphen	To represent compound terms
—	u2014	Em dash	In place of commas, parentheses (use em dash sparingly and instead use the alternatives)
–	u2013	En dash	To denote ranges
−	u2212	Minus	To represent subtraction
-	u002D	Hyphen-minus	ASCII hyphen