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Writing Resources

Punctuation sets the rhythm and pace of your writing. It can also affect your meaning. Before you punctuate, ask yourself a few questions about your sentence:

How would I speak this sentence out loud?
What function will the punctuation serve here?
What rules of punctuation apply?
You can resolve most of your punctuation questions by reading the sentence aloud. A full stop usually indicates a period. A pause usually suggests a comma. A rising, questioning intonation usually indicates a question mark. When you stop speaking abruptly, but make it clear that some related statement is immediately to follow, you should probably use a colon.

Functional Punctuation

These are the four basic functions of punctuation, and the punctuation marks that are associated with them:

To end a statement, use the period, question mark, or exclamation point. To introduce part of a sentence, use the comma, dash, or colon. To separate parts of a sentence or word, use the comma, semi-colon, dash, hyphen, or apostrophe. To enclose parts of a sentence or a whole sentence, use commas, dashes, quotation marks, single quotation marks, parentheses, brackets. (Enclosure marks are always used in pairs.)

Often, what seems like a punctuation problem is really a writing problem. If you know that something is wrong, and that you could fix it if you just knew where to put the comma or semi-colon, think again. Read the sentence aloud and see if perhaps the whole thing needs to be rewritten. Many punctuation questions disappear when you create a strong sentence structure.

© Elizabeth Danziger