Punctuation

Abstract

Correct punctuation plays a crucial part in the writing of clear English. The various marks are used to indicate:

• 1. stop or pause (full stop, question mark, exclamation mark, comma, semicolon, dash);

• 2. possession and omission (apostrophe, ellipsis marks);

• 3. direct speech or quotation (inverted commas or quotation marks);

• 4. apposition, bracketing, parenthesis (pairs of commas, pairs of dashes, round brackets, square brackets);

• 5. joining up (hyphen).