Correct and Effective Punctuation & Mechanics

Here we'll review the conventional uses of punctuation in American English.

Ernest Hemingway's attitude toward punctuation sounds eminently sensible: make sure that you know the rules before you break them. But just who made up these rules (or conventions) in the first place? Join us as we look for answers in this brief history of punctuation.

So, instant messengers, do you still think that punctuation is unimportant--that commas, colons, and similar squiggles are just pesky reminders of a bygone era? If so, here are two short stories that may change your mind.

Hitting the brakes is one of the first things we practice when learning how to drive. Knowing how and when to stop a sentence is also important.

This exercise will give you practice in using the end marks of punctuation: periods, question marks, and exclamation points.

After you have reviewed the article "End Punctuation: Periods, Question Marks, and Exclamation Points," try this short practice exercise. (The answers are on page two.)

If you grew up using a typewriter, you were probably taught to put two spaces after a period. But like the typewriter itself, that custom went out of fashion many years ago.

Since it first popped up in the 14th century, the exclamation point has generally been regarded as the hot-headed punk in the school of punctuation. Favored by advertisers, preteens, and writers of ransom notes, the exclamation point is less a mark of punctuation than an oratorical cue or a typographical shriek--in newspaper slang, a "screamer."

In his essay "In Praise of the Humble Comma," Pico Iyer compares the comma to "a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down." Here we'll consider four main guidelines for using commas effectively.

As a general rule, nonrestrictive words, phrases, and clauses are set off with commas. Test your punctuation prowess by completing this short exercise.

This sentence-imitation exercise will give you practice in applying our Top Four Guidelines for Using Commas Effectively.

This exercise offers practice in applying the rules for using commas effectively. Insert commas wherever you think they belong in the paragraph "The Least Successful Car." Try reading the paragraph aloud: at least in some cases, you should be able to hear where commas are needed.

Insert commas wherever you think they belong in the paragraph "Frederick Douglass." Try reading the paragraph aloud: at least in some cases, you should be able to hear where commas are needed.

The Oxford (or serial) comma is the comma that precedes the conjunction before the final item in a list of three or more items:

Stronger than a comma, less forceful than a period (or full stop): put simply, that's the nature of the semicolon. It's a mark, Lewis Thomas says, that offers "a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come." Here we'll consider the main uses of the semicolon.

No intestinal jokes here, please. We're talking about three much-abused marks of punctuation: semicolons, colons, and dashes.

This sentence-imitation exercise will give you practice in applying our guidelines for using semicolons, colons, and dashes.

This exercise offers practice in using commas and semicolons correctly.

The apostrophe may be the simplest and yet most frequently misused mark of punctuation in English. Here we'll review six guidelines for using the mark correctly.

This exercise will give you practice in applying the principles introduced in Guidelines for Using Apostrophes Correctly.

This exercise will give you practice in applying some of the principles introduced in "Using Apostrophes Correctly."

This exercise will give you practice in applying the first principle introduced in the article "Using Apostrophes Correctly": Use an apostrophe to show the omission of letters in a contraction.

Quotation marks, sometimes referred to as quotes or inverted commas, are punctuation marks used in pairs to set off a quotation or a piece of dialogue. At least that's how they're supposed to be used. Here are five guidelines for using quotation marks effectively.

This exercise will give you practice in applying our Guidelines for Using Quotation Marks Effectively (U.S. edition).

A look at the proliferation of quotation marks in some unexpected places.

The basic guidelines for using capital letters appear simple enough, but things become tricky once we get down to the details. Be guided (but not enslaved) by these 18 rules for capitalization in English.

To test your familiarity with the somewhat arbitrary rules for capitalization, edit the following sentences to correct any errors.

It's time to find out how well you can apply the guidelines for using punctuation marks correctly and effectively.

This exercise will give you practice in applying the principles introduced in Basic Rules of Punctuation, with special attention to the correct use of commas, colons, semicolons, and dashes.

This exercise offers practice in applying the guidelines for using punctuation marks. In the following paragraph, insert commas, quotation marks, colons, and dashes wherever you think they belong.

"That punctuation is important all agree," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1848, "but how few comprehend the extent of its importance!"

By demonstrating how a 19th-century poem might look after being played back through a Dictaphone (an early voice-recording device), Franklin P. Adams highlights (to the point of distraction) the usually unobtrusive marks of punctuation.

A table of the postal (or ZIP code) abbreviations for all 50 states along with their older (or traditional) abbreviations.