English Punctuation and How Its
Correct Use Can Improve Your
Writing Skills
Internet slang, SMS, and pure ignorance or laziness has led to an increasing lack
of the correct use of English punctuation marks. I do know there are variations in
its use, and of course the wonderful difference between English and American
English, as I am an Englishman I’ll use my common language.
Guidelines to go by
You can see how difficult it can be, so rather then to go into a complicated set of
rules, let me try and give you some simple guidelines to go by. If you use a word
processor, then the basic marks are pointed out for you, so my first tip is always
use a word processor!
To help you remember, I will break up punctuation marks into blocks. The first
three are: - Full stop, Question mark and Exclamation mark (!). These all come
at the end of a sentence.
The full stop (.) is also used after many abbreviations and in the middle of a
sentence if it is considered to be complete, as you can see highlighted above in
bold.
See what I mean?
A question mark (?) is used to indicate a direct question when placed at the end
of a sentence, see what I mean? The exclamation mark is used to express a
sudden outcry or to add emphasis to a statement got that? “Good grief!” Charley
Brown said.
Now we come to the lovely Quotation marks, My English teacher once said to me
“Always use quotation marks to enclose a direct quotation made by person, or if
you are quoting from a piece of literature”.
The Comma has a little more freedom.
There are other rules as well concerning quotation marks, for example, if you are
quoting two different people, then separate them by starting a new line. The
comma has a little more freedom than the others, its used to separate words or
numbers you could write (a, b, and c) but it would also be correct to write (a, b
and c) the first example is using serial commas, whereas the second example is
not. I prefer the latter.
I have only just skimmed the surface of English punctuation and its correct use
but if you concentrate on the ones I have pointed out, you will be well on the
way to improving the way you work is read
Improve your writing skills.
There are many more punctuation marks these include, the exclamation mark,
semicolon, colon, dash, hyphen, parentheses, brackets and apostrophes.
Knowing where and when to use these can greatly improve your writing skills.
I bet there are at this very moment, scholars all over the country scanning my
work to find all the mistakes I have made