Punctuation & Mechanics
28 February 2019
Not this kind of mechanic
COMMAS
Uses
●
●
●
●
Before coordinating conjunction when connect two independent
clauses
After Introductory word, phrase, or clause
Separate items in a series
Sets off nonessential and essential elements
○
○
●
●
●
●
●
Essential = needed to understand the sentence
Nonessential = not needed to understand sentence
Set off information that interrupts flow of sentence
Transitions
Direct quotations
Direct address, Yes or No, interjection, tag question
Addresses, place names, dates
Check for Unnecessary
Commas
●
Do NOT use a comma:
○
○
○
○
○
Between subject and verb
Between verb and object
After coordinating conjunction
After like or such as
After a question mark or exclamation point
SEMICOLONS
Uses
●
●
Between two independent clauses
In a series with commas
Check for Semicolon Mistakes
●
Do NOT use a semicolon:
○
○
Set off an introductory clause
Introduce a list
END PUNCTUATION
Periods
●
●
End a declarative sentence
Indirect questions
○
●
Report what someone else has
asked
Abbreviations
Question Marks
●
End a direct question
Exclamation Point
●
●
Express strong emotion
Add emphasis
●
USE SPARINGLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
QUOTATION MARKS
Direct Quotations
●
●
Spoken or written by others
When used with phrases he said, she said, etc., use a comma
between verb and quote
○
,
Tim said “Martin stepped off his skateboard and tore all the ligaments in his
knee.”
●
●
Do not use between that and quotation
Dialogue
○
Add new paragraph and new quotation marks for change of speaker.
Long Quotations
●
The line before your long quotation, when you're introducing the
quote, usually ends with a colon.
●
The long quotation is indented half an inch from the rest of the
text, so it looks like a block of text.
●
There are no quotation marks around the quotation.
●
The period at the end of the quotation comes before your in-text
citation as opposed to after, as it does with regular quotations.
Long Quotations
Titles
●
Short stories, poems, song titles,
article titles, chapter titles, episode
names etc. are place in quotation
marks
○
○
○
○
○
○
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is a
short story written by Ambrose Bierce
“The Road Not Taken” is a poem written
by Robert Frost
“Paradise City” is a song off of Guns n
Roses’ album Appetite for Destruction
“The Foundation of Existentialism in the
Oldest Story Ever Told” in an article from
Existential Analysis
“MLA Style” is chapter 54 in the textbook
“"Lawnmower Dog" is the name of the
second episode of Rick & Morty
When quoting a passage that already
contains a quote, change the inner
quotes to a single quote.
Graham Midgley writes that according to Jenna Hammac, “the reason
that the edges of the new Rotoblade 5000 are dull is because ‘direct
contact with that type of knife-edge will cause irreparable damage’ to
both persons and property.”
According to The Norton Anthology of American Literature “Ambrose
Bierce’s short story ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ is one of the
most anthologized American short stories ever.”
With Other Punctuation
●
●
●
COMMAS AND PERIODS GO INSIDE CLOSING QUOTATION MARKS
○ “The instructor grew tired of making the same corrections.”
Semicolons and colons go OUTSIDE closing quotation marks
Question marks and exclamation points go inside if part of the
quote and outside if not
○
○
Joey Tribiani is known for asking, “How you doing?”
Can anyone else recite “The Road Not Taken”?
With Parenthetical
Documentation
●
Documentation of a cited source goes AFTER the closing
quotation mark and any end punctuation goes after that.
○
An avid fan of cinema, Jason Burlinson is known to have said, “If the British
accent doesn’t make an appearance in a period film, I cannot take it seriously”
(152).
Do not use quotation marks to
identify slang or for emphasis.
Do not use quotation marks for
indirect quotes.
APOSTROPHE
Possessive
●
Most singular nouns, add
apostrophe and - s
○
●
Jesus’
Bill Gates’
●
●
Indicates where omitted
letters would have been
But we DON’T use
contractions in our papers,
right? RIGHT? Class? Hello…
Plural noun not ending in -s,
add -’s; ending in -s, simply
add apostrophe
○
○
●
Charlie’s
If adding -’s complicates
pronunciation, simply use an
apostrophe
○
○
●
Contractions
Women’s
Neighbors’
Indefinite pronoun - add ‘s
○
Everyone’s
Well this is awkward...
Plurals
●
May see certain numbers,
letters, abbreviations, etc.
using apostrophes to make
plural
○
○
○
○
●
7’s
A’s
NGO’s
Thank you’s
DO NOT DO THIS!
Check for Mistakes
●
Do NOT use an apostrophe:
○
○
○
Plural noun not possessive
His, hers, yours, theirs
Possessive its
OTHER PUNCTUATION
Colons
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Direct attention to words that follow
○
My older brother never forgot his four
best friends: Dorothy, Rose, Blanche,
and Sofia.
Salutation in a business letter
○
Dear sir or madam:
Ratios
○
I’ll give you 3:1 odds that I can get you
betting by the end of the day.
Between titles and subtitles
○
Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to
Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Between city and publisher in bibliographies
○
New York: Bantam, 2019
Between chapter and verse in biblical
references
○
“Jesus wept” (John 11:35)
Between numbers that indicate hours,
minutes, and seconds
○
Class starts at 6:30 pm.
Dashes
●
Set off material you want to
emphasize.
○
○
●
Signal a shift in tone or thought
○
●
Unlike colons, can appear at other
points in a sentence, not just
independent clause
It did not occur to me -- possibly
because I am an American -- that
there could be people anywhere who
had never seen a Negro.
■
James Baldwin, “Stranger in the
Valley”
The best way to keep children home is
to make the home atmosphere
pleasant -- and take the air out of the
tires
■
Dorothy Parker
Use only when material
needs specific emphasis
Parentheses & Brackets
●
Parentheses enclose supplemental details or digressions
○
●
Brackets are used around words you insert into a quotation
○
●
Before he became the biggest name in Hollywood, Dwayne Johnson (then
called The Rock) was a professional wrestler.
As Ty Kinder explained, “He [Jeff Cootes] argues that the Canadian healthcare
system is far superior to that of the United States.”
If your quote contains a mistake, use the Latin word sic in
brackets to indicate that it is not your mistake
○
Chris continuously made the argument that “you can’t take that from me its
mines [sic].”
Ellipses
●
Indicate an omission or a pause
○
So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book
ever written. Michelangelo, you know a lot about him. Life's work, political
aspirations, him and the Pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I'll
bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually
stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that. If I ask you about
women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You may
have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up
next to a woman and feel truly happy. You're a tough kid. And I'd ask you about
war, you'd probably throw Shakespeare at me, right? "Once more into the breach,
dear friends." But you've never been near one. You've never held your best friend's
head in your lap, and watch him gasp his last breath looking to you for help. I'd
ask you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at
a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with
her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you. Who could rescue
you from the depths of Hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel,
Ellipses
●
With Ellipses
○
So if I asked you about art, you'd probably give me the skinny on every art book ever
written...But I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never
actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that. If I ask you
about women, you'd probably give me a syllabus about your personal favorites. You
may have even been laid a few times. But you can't tell me what it feels like to wake up
next to a woman and feel truly happy….I'd ask you about love, you'd probably quote me
a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known
someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on Earth just
for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of Hell. And you wouldn't know what it's
like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything….You
don't know about real loss, 'cause that only occurs when you've loved something more
than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much.
■ Robin Williams as Sean Maguire, Good Will
Hunting 1997
Slashes
●
When quoting one or more
lines of poetry
○
“Two roads diverged in a gentle
wood / And sorry I could not
travel both”
HYPHENS
Compound Words
●
●
●
●
Compound adjectives
○
little-known author
○
foul-smelling fish
Do not use when connecting -ly adverb and an adjective
○
A carefully executed plan
Prefixes & Suffixes
○
With great-, self-, and -elect
■
great-grandfather
■
self-hatred
■
president-elect
○
With capital letter
■
anti-American
○
With numbers
■
mid-1990s
○
To avoid double & triple letters
■
ball-like
○
For clarity
■
re-cover (to cover again) as opposed to recover (get well)
Numbers
○
Fractions & compound numbers
■
three-quarters
■
thirty-seven
CAPITALIZATION
Proper Nouns and
common nouns
●
●
●
Titles Before a Person’s
Name
Common Noun
● Professional titles are
○ A person, place, or thing
capitalized when they appear
■ doctor
before a person’s name, but
■ river
■ country
not when they appear after
■ tissue
○ Senator Bob Menendez
■ actor
○ Bob Menendez, senator
Proper Noun
○ A specific person, place, or thing
■ Phil McGraw
■ Mississippi River
■ Spain
■ Kleenex
■ Bradley Cooper
Adjective derived from proper nouns are capitalized
○ Shakespearean, Victorian, French
The first word of a
sentence
●
●
●
Capitalize the first word in a sentence.
The first word of a quoted sentence should be
capitalized
○ An avid fan of cinema, Jason Burlinson is
known to have said, “If the British accent
doesn’t make an appearance in a period film,
I cannot take it seriously”
A quoted phrase does not need the first word
capitalized.
○ Jason Burlinson said, when speaking of the
British accent in period films, that he “cannot
take it seriously’ if the accent does not
appear.
Titles & Subtitles
●
Capitalize the first and
last words and all other
important words of a title
and subtitle.
○
○
○
“I Write Sins Not Tragedies”
Memoirs of a Geisha
Wicked: The Life and Times
of the Wicked Witch of the
West
ITALICS
Titles of Long Works
Titles and subtitles of long works should appear in italics, unless sacred
writing such as Qu’ran or Old Testament and historical documents such
as the Declaration of Independence
Books: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Periodicals: USA Today
Newspapers: New Jersey Herald
Play: Twelfth Night
Long Poems: Beowulf
Film & Video: The Dark Knight Rises
Musical Works/Albums: Ten
Radio & TV Series: Riverdale
Paintings, Sculptures: Mona Lisa
Dances by a choreographer: Mark Morris’ Gloria
Software: Adobe Acrobat
Ships, Spacecraft: Titanic
Websites: Biography
Words Discussed as
Words
Non-English Words
●
Unfamiliar word or phrase in a
language other than English
○ Wayne decided it best to cover
up his sic vis pacem, para
bellum tattoo before the job
interview
●
Do not italicize those words that have
been adopted into everyday English,
or has an entry in English-language
dictionaries
○ Schadenfreude is a German
word that essentially means
“happiness at the misfortune of
others.”
Use also for numbers, letters, and symbols
Over the course of 300 words, you have
used the word sophisticated seventeen
times!
Bobby always has trouble remembering
how many times the letter s appears in
possessions.
Steve was amazed to find that everyone’s
social security numbers contain some
combination of 3s, 5s, and 9s.
ABBREVIATIONS
General Notes on Abbreviations
●
Can use common abbreviations if you are
sure readers will recognize them
○
●
NJ, MTV, DC, ROFL, LOL, DIY
If reader will not immediately know what
the abbreviation stands for, spell it all out
the first time with abbreviation in
parenthesis.
○
○
After this, you can use just the abbreviation
Sources at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
claim that the number of Chickenpox cases has
decreased dramatically since the discovery of
the vaccine.
With Names &
Numbers
●
Most titles are abbreviated when
before or after a name:
○
○
○
○
●
●
Months, days, colleges &
universities, cities, states, and
countries should not be
abbreviated
●
Some Latin abbreviations
such as ibid., op. cit., and et
al. are not appropriate for
use in the body of a paper.
Rev. Paul Miller
Dr. Anita Skye
Philip Romano, MD
The following abbreviations can be
used with numbers:
○
○
○
○
○
○
In Notes &
Documentation
654 BC (“before Christ”)
300 BCE (“before common era”)
AD 1892 (“anno Domini”)
1993 CE (“common era”)
9:24 AM (also written “a.m.”)
6:30 PM (also written “p.m.”)
○
Use English equivalent instead
■ “And others” in place of et
al..
NUMBERS
Notes on Numbers
●
MLA style recommends spelling out all numbers up to a
hundred and all round numbers
○
○
●
MLA recommends using numerals for specific numbers
after one hundred
○
●
twenty-five
fifty thousand
101
For larger numbers that include a decimal or a fraction,
use a combination of both
○
4.5 billion
Numerals Used in all the
following situations
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
Addresses
Dates
Money in exact amounts
Parts of written works
Percentages
Ratios
Statistics
○
●
●
average age of my siblings and I is 39.6
Times of the Day
Whole numbers with decimals or fractions