Okay, this is simple, right? Yes, but simple doesn’t always mean easy. Unless we’re talking about getting it wrong. Quotation marks, sometimes called inverted commas or speech marks, are one of the easiest punctuation marks to get wrong. The problem lies in the way they muscle around the punctuation marks that play the supporting role, […]
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The once-popular colon/semicolon key on our computer keyboards is, I fear, gathering dust. And while it’s probably a good thing that in the twenty-first century we favour minimalist punctuation, let’s not let fashion and flavour blind us to the important tasks these punctuation marks can perform. The colon and semi-colon are not there just to […]
Continue readingYou’re passionate about your book’s subject. You want to emphasise how important your message is. Or you want to bring some enthusiasm and excitement to a topic you worry your readers will find dry and dull. The solution – an exclamation mark!Or is it?Readers understand that exclamation marks convey emotion. So when they see a […]
Continue readingShould you hang in there with a hyphen or get dramatic with a dash? Good question, and fortunately there’s an easy way to answer it. Although they look alike, hyphens and dashes are used for very different reasons. Hyphens are joiners; they help words hold hands. Dashes, in contrast, are drama queens that like to […]
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The humble comma is the smallest, lightest, briefest of pauses available in English grammar. It’s the baby of the punctuation marks. But babies, commas often find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. The chief function of a comma is to indicate where we should pause when reading a sentence. This pause is […]
Continue readingThe apostrophe is one of the hardest working punctuation marks in the English language. Not surprisingly, it’s also one of the most misused. Debate has raged among grammarians over some of its more esoteric uses,but the rules for its two most important functions (possession and omission) are pretty clear. We’ll look at those functions here, […]
Continue readingIn 2003, an unknown British author named Lynne Truss wrote a little book called Eats, Shoots and Leaves. To the astonishment of both author and publisher, the book sold over three million copies, and Lynne was able to fulfil her dream of quitting her day job and writing full-time in her pyjamas. The subject of her […]
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