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?

Spoken Punctuation

You can resolve most of your punctuation questions by reading the sentence aloud. When you stop and inflect your voice downward, you will usually use 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. If you stop briefly, you will probably use a semi-colon.

Functional Punctuation

These are the four basic functions of punctuation. The punctuation marks that are associated with them are:

1. To end a statement, use the period, question mark, or exclamation point.
2. To introduce part of a sentence, use the comma, dash, or colon.
3. To separate parts of a sentence or word, use the comma, semi-colon, dash, hyphen, or apostrophe.
4. 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.)

A summary of the rules of punctuation appears in part 8 of my book, Get to the Point!.

Is This Really A Punctuation Problem?

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.

© 2009 Elizabeth Danziger