Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Punctuation
Punctuation
3. After single words that can stand alone and form Hello.
a sentence. Stop.
4. To separate the whole number from the decimal. 9.76 = Nine point seventy-six
The ellipsis To indicate omissions (something from the quoted You know how I’m feeling…
text is left out).
1. Before coordinating conjunctions linking They want to learn English, yet they
between independent clauses. never attended.
The semicolon 1. To join independent clauses, which are She collected the data; she even
thematically linked, in place of a conjunction. discussed the results.
2. To separate phrases in a list which already The speakers were: Dr Sally Meadows,
contain a comma. Biology; Dr Fred Eliot, Animal Welfare;
Ms Gerri Taylor, Sociology; and Prof.
Julie Briggs, Chemistry.
The colon 1. To introduce quotes, explanation, examples, list He did only one mistake: misspelled my
of items. name.
The hyphen/ the dash 1. It is called a hyphen when it joins words Tooth-paste, re-cover, and sixty-four
together as in compound nouns, verbs, adjectives
and numbers.
2. It is called a dash when it separates words as in We might find the solution-you never
parenthetical elements and comments. It is less know.
formal than using parentheses or two commas.
Brackets (British Eng.) Just like commas, they are used to add an Linda and Sally (who were lab partners)
Parentheses (Amr. Eng) explanation or comments. discovered a new species.
The question mark To mark the end of direct questions. Where is the lab mouse?
No question mark is needed at the end of reported She asked me where the lab mouse was.
questions.
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/exercises/3/
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/exercises/grammar/grammar_tutorial/page_55.htm